Making the Ferris Wheel

After making the tent, Hayley said she would like to make the stall so I got onto other aspects of the environment and started to make the ferris wheel. I had no idea how I was going to make this object, so I sort of went into it open minded and if it went wrong, then it went wrong and I would think of something else to make. 

I started off by trying to make the basis of a ferris wheel, which are the circular bars. I went about this a few different ways before I actually got what I wanted. Firstly, I thought I would use the 'cylinder' polygons and delete the faces, however like the cone, I could not add edge loops to the face. Therefore I then tried thinning out the donut polygon, but this did not look realistic or stylised enough for me. Then finally I found the perfect polygon, and shrunk it down to my desired size.

Trying to get the proportions together was a big challenge for me because I wanted everything to feel right. Therefore I practiced a lot trying to get the tent and the circular bars to look compatible together, as if they were actually on a fair ground.

Then I made the bars to actually hold the ferris wheel up and this was easy enough because I could actually duplicate them and use them for the bars in the centre of the wheel also! 

I then made some simple seats for the ferris wheel but not too detailed because our whole scene is going to be rather simplistic and I thought it would be a bit odd if one object was more intricate than the others. I also coloured the wheel as I went along, trying to follow the colour palette of our choices. I did not UV map this ferris wheel because it would have taken a really long time and I thought the colours looked nice enough as they were.

I then did some lighting tests and was really pleased at how the light effected the scene/environment. I also had a go at changing the colours of the lights and I really liked this even more. I think trying to get the lights to move will be another thing for me to experiment with, but so far I am very pleased with how our environment is coming along!

                            

This is a rendered version of the scene without a background, however I am really enjoying seeing the environment at night and this maybe a good idea to set the animation this way?