Topper

The Inspiration

My grandparents had a gumball machine in the beach house I had the privilege of visiting every summer. When deciding on what to model next, I look at it, and knew it had to be done.

The Real Deal

Here is a brief photo of the actual gumball machine I used as inspiration.

Label Design

Fortunately, I have a lot of experience in Adobe Illustrator, meaning re-creating the 'Topper" logo wasn't an extreme challenge. If you look closely, you might find a secret!

Materials and all

At this point, I didn't know anything about UV mapping in Blender, so I stuck to flat materials with bump maps. Nonetheless, I would argue the results were great.

Materials and all continued

As you can see, the surfaces look fairly realistic all things considered. The 'THANK YOU' imprint was the only thing I had to use mapping for, and it was done by baking a THANK YOU imprint on a plane, and importing that in as a normal map on the new surface I wanted it applied to.

The gumballs

I tried to use geometry nodes to randomly distribute gumballs throughout a volume, and quickly learned that wasn't do-able. The answer? Stack 64 gumballs in a vertical line above the machine, remove the lid, and let a physics simulation have the balls fall into the machine and sort themselves. Interestingly, in the first second of the video, you can see one gumball shifting.

The Final Result

All of this work came together to make this gumball machine!

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