Bowls

In the early stages of the project, my friend Harry Cox in 3rd year graphic design approached me to ask if I could produce a set of bowls of his design in a 3D program. The bowls were to have different patterns and lighting affects to make them look like a real product. The products he was designing were Thai soup bowls that you put in the microwave. The pattern on the bowl changes colour when the soup is at the right temperature. The bowls were for his end of degree show and final project. I agreed to make the bowls as I thought it would give me an opportunity to become familiar with Maya, the software in which my current project was based in. Little did I know the amount of time and effort the bowls would take.
The first stage of making the bowls was modelling them, at first I didn’t know how to make as complicated an item as a bowl, I had only experimented with primitive polygons. I watched a Video tutorial on Youtube about how to make a vase; I applied the same principles but implemented them to a bowl shape. They are fundamentally made in the same way.

The bowl started off as a cylinder primitive object, the first stage is to make the base of the bowl very thin, with the top circle of the cylinder far larger than the bottom circle to create a shallow angle. The next stage is to repeat the process of extruding the top circle upwards and increasing the size of the circle, this creates an outwards curve. The middle part of the bowl is relatively vertical so the only thing different in the creating process is not to enlarge the circle after extruding and moving upwards.
To create the lip at the top of the bowl, the circle size is made smaller. As the pictures required for Harry’s product didn’t include the inside of the bowl it didn’t need to be modelled. So the top of the bowl is the top circle of the cylinder. The bowl is in essence a modified cylinder.When creating the bowl I used a set of images Harry made of the bowls on Photoshop.

To create the lid of the bowl I used exactly the same process as the main body of the bowl. The only difference is that the bottom circle of the cylinder is the largest and it sits on the top of the bowl, then the extrusions are made and the top circle is scaled in, to create an inwards curve.
There was a happy accident when creating the lid of the bowl. I was in a rush to get it finished before Harry came to see it. I was supposed to make the lid in a smooth inward curve. What I had made was a lid with two separate curves which created a ridge in the middle of the lid. I decided I would fine tune the centre of the lid after Harry’s visit. However, Harry liked the lid as it resembled a Thai building roof. Therefore it was left the same.
While making the curves of the bowl and the lid, I ensured that there were more vertices to create the look of a smooth curve; the straighter parts of the curve require fewer vertices.

Another way I could have created the bowl was by using a NURBS curve. I could have created the curve of one half of the bowl, then joined the curve at the centre of a primitive cube and extruded the face out along the curve. The next stage would have been to modify the number of subdivisions of the extrusion to make the curve of the cube smooth. Then to create the rest of the bowl using the edge of the curve as the centre pivot point.I used the method of extruding a face of a cube along a NURBS curve to create the piece of card that runs from the lid of the bowl to the base, the card is to display the type of soup, cooking instructions and ingredients of the soup. I found this method useful as it was easy to fine tune and adjust the vertices of the curve and therefore the piece of card.

This picture bellow shows my first attempt at creating a set of bowls; this was before I received the reference pictures from Harry and before I knew he only wanted profile shots of the bowls. That is why I modelled the inside of the bowls. It is more difficult to model the inside of the bowl as you cannot see inside it. If you model in wire frame mode, you cannot see the perspective of the bowl so you cannot know how thick or thin you are making the bowl.
This picture bellow shows the final shape of the bowl complete with “card” label and lid. Once the Model was made, the next stage was to put the patterns designed by Harry on the Bowls via UV mapping. Luckily the day after I finished modelling the bowl was the lesson on textures and UV mapping for the GAD4 project.