Gingerbread Slums
The Gingerbread Slums was made as part of my 3d Environments class. I took the idea of the Gingerbread Man and then tried to think of what the world he lived in looked like. It’s done as a public access puppet show, a low-budget version of Lamb Chops type thing. I created the character of The Gingerbread Man for a role-playing game based on the Marvel comic world, through this game his back story was formed. The Gingerbread Man was the world’s best baker but the world’s second best baker was jealous so one night he pushed The Gingerbread Man into a vat of Gingerbread, but The Gingerbread Man was such a good baker he managed to fuse himself with the dough and became what we now know as The Gingerbread Man. His girlfriend re-bakes him every night and he tries to clean up the cruminals of society (but mostly of those in Las Vegas). He lives in Las Vegas because there is no other place in the world where a man made out of gingerbread could run around and not cause a stir. During my researching phase for this projects I found and compared pictures of gingerbread houses and candy with slums in India and Africa…the end result took the exact architecture of some of the slum buildings but replaced all the materials with candy.
Method:
Modeling everything for this wasn’t actually very hard, it’s all very basic shapes, however texturing is what I spent most of my time on. Trying to make all the candies look like real candies was pretty difficult. I bought actual candy and scanned it all in, then loaded it in and pretty much just experimented with Photoshopping the files until it looked right. The Graham Crackers were especially difficult because so much focus would be on them, for that I actually scanned all the sides of a graham cracker for and edited by hand the bump map so that it would be about right. The hardest part of this all was actually the lollipop lights though, they are actually built like a real light bulb and emit light in the same way. Texturing each part of it changed things a lot and trying to get the bulb texture to let the right amount of light out while still looking real took a lot of trial and error. I used a lot of Mental Ray textures, and actually textured the lightbulbs so that whatever way you were facing it it was clear in front of you but on the sides it would get more opaque because you’re looking through more glass. This helped make it look more realistic, in a way that was fairly easy to do. I also used HDR Image lighting to give it a feel of actually being in a poorly lit room.