Page 8: Snowman

Box 1: Exercise 4, Make a snowman using THREE!

You should make the snowman using THREE primitives. You can use spheres for the snowballs (the main parts of the body), a cone to make a carrot nose, a cylinder and a ring to make a top hat, etc.

You’ll need to make primitives (Spheres, Cones, …) and use their transformations (position, scale, rotation) to assemble the snowman.

You can use simple materials of different colors (e.g., MeshPhongMaterial or MeshStandardMaterial). A white standard material won’t look like snow, but it will be good enough for this assignment. Our goal is that you know how to apply materials to get different colors, not necessarily to make materials to get special effects (like snow).

The main point of the assignment is create a specific shape using THREE primitives.

At a minimum, your snowman must have a body, a head, eyes, and a nose. We were thinking of the “classic three-ball snowman” (see the Wikipedia Page, for example), which gives enough parts (3 sections of the body, eyes, a nose, a mouth). You can add the hat and corncob pipe too. If you want to be more creative, make a regular snowman first, and then put another one next to it.

You do not need to animate your snowman. But you can get advanced points for something animated, such as having stick arms that wave.

Please put in a piece of ground (it can be a flat box) that the snowman stands on.

We’ve given you a start in 06-08-01.js ( 06-08-01.html) where you should put your drawing code.

Here’s is a place to put the snowman. We have already loaded THREE and OrbitControls. Please add OrbitControls to your picture. Note: we haven’t given you much in this file. It’s up to you to make the lights, camera, objects, etc. We just took care of the renderer.

Note: There is a second programming assignment on Page9. We’ve re-stated the ground rules for both programming assignments after the picture.

Ground Rules for Workbook 6

For the programming assignment, we are going to ask you to make some pictures by writing programs that use THREE. We want you to focus on using the parts that we’ve discussed, not trying to show off that you can figure out the fancier features on your own.

You must:

• Use one material per primitive object.
• Use solid colors (no textures).
• Use only built-in shapes (do not make your own meshes).
• Do not use reflections.
• You do not need to add shadows (but you can keep the ones we have in the starter code)
• Do not add other object models (although, you can use the sample ones we provided).
• Do not make your own new kinds of materials (by writing shaders).

You’ll get to do all of these things later in the class. For now, you can be creative and make sure you understand how to put together the basic pieces.

Next: Space-Age Sculpture Museum