Based on the classic 80’s Carousel Gumball Machine, this was a fun little project. I’ve always wanted one, and now I have one, albeit virtually!

On a technical level, the gumballs themselves were tricky to create; I eventually settled on using tyFlow to create the balls (utilizing PhysX), while also setting the ones that were near the surface of the glass globe to be a higher fidelity sphere, while the ones near the middle are lower. This allowed me to cut down on the triangle count while still retaining a good feel for actual geometry, rather than trying to use a fake flat texture map for the gumballs. Still, the gumballs take up a very large majority of the triangle budget on this one!

Good learning experience all around, and I encourage anyone who uses 3ds Max to check out tyFlow, it looks like it’ll be a great plugin!