This was a self-guided project to create a product animation. I wanted to create a moody, tech-oriented piece.
I chose an old Amazon Tap that I had because I found the shape to be interesting, while presenting several opportunities to further develop my hard surface modeling skills. Notably, inset shapes and bevels across the cylindrical body as well as a highly textured mesh material stretched over the majority of the product.
Because this was a personal project, I elected to change a few features from the original design. I updated the USB port to a USB-C style port to make it more modern. I also chose to add a light ring around the microphone button. This was not a feature of the Amazon Tap originally, but it is a feature across many of Amazon's current Echo products. I found this to be an interesting modification to make that still fit stylistically.
The model is composed of two distinct pieces, each controlled via a simple rig. Each piece is composed of multiple geometry meshes. The mesh is rendered with Sub-Div modeling, with the exception of the tessellation.
The speaker mesh material was generated via tissue tessellation. I needed to create a secondary speaker mesh to control for the edge flow of the tissue tessellation as the underlying topology was not ideal for tessellation, although it was ideal for basic cylinder shape.
The light ring and the power button are each controlled via a set driver linked to an Emission node.
