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Unit: Patterns

About this unit

To make the surfaces of characters or objects seem believable, artists at Pixar take basic patterns and use computer graphics to make those patterns more random. You’ll get to use randomness in this lesson, when you make your very own dinosaur skin!

Geometry of dinosaur skin

In this lesson, you will learn about the geometry of dinosaur scales. You’ll make your own skin model using something called a "Voronoi partition." This lesson takes 45-60 minutes to complete.

Learn

Start here!
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Introduction to Patterns
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What are shading packets?
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Voronoi Partition
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Distributing sites randomly
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Modeling dino skin
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Make your own dino skin 1
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Getting to know Ana
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Getting to know Beth
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Practice

Shading Packets
9 questions
Constructing a Voronoi partition
9 questions
Poisson disc process
5 questions

Painting with randomness

This lesson explores how "Perlin noise" is used to generate organic looking patterns for things like dinosaur skin. It takes 45-60 minutes to complete.