Jelly

Imagine if you held this strange rock in your hand. Or perhaps its not a rock, but a wobbling blue blob of jelly. Or maybe its a freeze frame of a large drop of colored mercury floating in free space. We get a lot of information from sight, but the sense of touch can make all the difference in identifying something.

I learnt two things to make this unidentified non-flying object. The first was meta-balls, an old technology in the graphics world, where you place balls in 3D space that "bleed" into each other when they come close. And then you sculpt them by smoothing, inflating, and shrinking their vertices. And end up with really strange looking shapes.

Secondly, I am finally starting to learn how to do textures in Blender. This object has a cloud texture affecting the colors, and a ''stucci'' texture affecting the normals, which means that it creates fake shadows and highlights over its surface. They may be fake, but they convincingly fool the eye into seeing indentations and folds where none actually exist.

So pick up this blob, and feel the lovely wobbly jelly all over your fingers. Then taste it - its blueberry. Yum.