Coding 8, Section 7 Patterns

For 8th grade Science/Coding I am doing Pixar in a Box in Khan Academy. Right now I am doing the seventh section in the course.

The seventh section in the Pixar in a Box course is patterns. There are two part of this section, “Geometry of Dinosaur Skin” and Painting with Randomness”.

Part One

The first part of the lesson is based off of the Good Dinosaur movie. It focused on how the animators at Pixar made dinosaur skin for Arlo (the dinosaur). I learned about how patterns work.  Each part of the dinosaur scales are made of sites.  You can think of sites as little dots, around these dots or sites, are lines.  These are called cells, these make up the scales of Arlo.

I also learned about something called a Voronoi Partition.  A Voronoi Partition is something that we see in everyday life.  The Voronoi Partition can be seen in the skin of giraffes.  To explain what this is, I’ll use bubbles.  When you blow bubbles they all merge together, right?  Imagine two small bubbles next to each other with a small dot in the center.  We call the dot a site.  When you blow up the bubbles they get bigger and merge into each other.  Each bubble is known as a cell, and the lines around them are known as boundaries.  Something cool about Voronoi Partition is that if you choose a random point on a boundary it is the same distance away from the two nearest sites.  And when three lines meet it makes a vertex, it is also an equal distance away from the three nearest sites.

At the end of part one I was able to make my own dinosaur skin!  I was able to control the color of the skin, the size and color of the scales, and how far the scales will extrude from the leg.

I unfortunately, was not able to put the picture of the dinosaur skin into this post.

Part Two

In Part Two I learned about low and high resolution.  It is how close the camera sees something.  Low resolution is seeing something from really far away and high resolution is seeing something that is really enlarged.  I also learned about Perlin noise.  To put it in laymen terms, it can control color in animation using resolution.

I was able to make my own dinosaur skin at the end of the lesson.  This time I was able to control the resolution of the skin and scales.

I unfortunately, could not put a picture of my second dinosaur skin into this post.

That was what I learned from Section 7, Patterns of Khan Academy’s Pixar in a Box course.  The next essay will be about Section 8, Rigging.

Thanks for reading!