Eggplant 3

A 5 minute animation of part 3 is available via the following table:

From school server (fast but only works at school)		From internet server (slower but works anywhere that has ADSL)
SWF file	web page	Web page

Part 3: Bend the stalk

A straight stem is pretty boring. Using a couple of modifiers can really help here. First make sure you're in the front view. Click on the add modifier tool , then click on the lower part of the stem and drag up about 2/3 of the way. Select bend modifier from the dialog, and a yellow modifier grid appears. It may not be visible if it's narrower than the stem. If so you can either switch to wire frame, or just continue and it should become visible.
Next select the scale non uniform tool and click and drag the left mouse button to the right until the modifier is slightly wider than the top part of your model. Select both the model and the modifier (you can use the right mouse in point-select mode to add additional objects to the selected list) and click on Build>Modifiers>Bind Modifier from the menu.

Double click on the modifier grid and a parameter dialog will appear. Enter -60 for the bend angle, click OK, and see the results! It some parts of your plant are stretched way out of shape, it's probably because the modifier wasn't wide enough to include the whole top part of the plant. Click on Build>Modifiers>Effect Modifier and the change is permanent.

Now add another bend modifier starting up the stem a bit, and in the general direction that the stem goes, with a bend angle of about 90 degrees. You've now finished the main part of the eggplant!

Creating the egg is easy. Select the sphere tool

and click-drag in the window to add a sphere with about the right size to fit neatly into the plant. Then double-click on the sphere and set and the longitude and latitude divisions to 32 and 24. Click OK, and then select Build>Convert To Mesh from the menu.

Now your sphere is an editable mesh so you can use a modifier on it to scale the tip into more of an egg shape. Add a taper modifier that just covers the entire sphere, bind it to the sphere, and set the taper value to about 0.4 to make an egg.

Now all you have to do is put them together, and pick some materials. Rotate the egg to the right and move it into place atop the stem. You might need to scale it up or down a bit to make it fit exactly.

To add your materials, select Options>Materials from the menu to show the material panel. Double click on the "New" material and select the stem's properties. Then select the stem and click on the "Apply" button at the top of the material panel. Do the same for the egg. In the example at the left the Brilliance is set to 1.8 to make the purple deeper and richer. This won't show up in the interactive mode, but will in the rendered views. The Roughness is 16 and the Specular weight is 0.4, just so you know.

You might want to select both parts and stick 'em together by using the Build>Group menu command. This way they don't get out of position relative to each other as easily as you work.

To download an Anim8or project containing the model built in the tutorial, and some intermediate snapshots, click here: tutorial_eggplant.zip.