Rendered Endangered is a charity concept I came up with for a project. I set out to design an application that allowed the user to find out facts about different endangered animals.
I went with this idea, as it led off a previous project that I'd finished, where I researched different countries currencies and the symbols found on them. I decided to create an application, as I thought it would be an interesting, interactive way to get facts across to users and to convince them to donate to the charity.
I created the app in Adobe XD as a prototype, which allowed me to add transition animations for different components using Auto Animate. For the 3D animals that are the centre of attention on the app, I used Blender. I wanted to create them in a low poly style, to get across the point that I had rendered the models myself.
The first animal that I decided to model was a rhino. I started with a 2D image that I downloaded from Google Images. I then traced around the image roughly with the plane tool. I extruded the sides, moving some areas further than others. I shaped one side of the rhino until I was happy and then mirrored from the middle to copy it onto the other side. I finally added parts such as the horns and ears in a similar way. I finally added a grass sphere underneath for the rhino to stand on.
For the panda model, I used a similar technique to the rhino, using a 2D image as a base. However when it came to texturing the panda, I had to select different sections to make some parts black and some white.
The whale model was very different compared to the other 2 models. Even though I used the same technique of using a 2D image, it was much harder to get the base shape correct. I then had to figure out how to create the fins, which I did by creating separate planes that I joined to the main model at the end. for the mouth, I had to separately extrude different sections inside, texturing the faces black. I used a noise map on a plane for the water mesh underneath and textured this blue.
