CSCI 140 Group Gallery

3-D Computer Modeling 
CSCI 140 Fall 2002

Dreamscape

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Emelia Michels-Ratliff
Harley Wettemann
Cole Ferrier


Dreamscape
by
The Mad Hatters		Group Scene
 
Inspiration

Finding one inspiration for three people can be quite difficult, so our group decided to do a very surreal type scene, where we could each add objects from our own imagination.  The result is a dreamlike scene, where objects that would never meet that way in the real world can live side by side forming a sort of alternate reality.  We began with the idea of a fish swimming by a lighthouse, seeing as those are two things that would certainly never be so close in reality.  From there we just each started adding object ideas that we could see in our mind, and wanted to attempt to model out.  Working this way was actually rather fun, because it gave us the chance to be a bit more free with Lightwave, and to let our imaginations go.  So often with 3D modeling, artists do their best to duplicate items and textures from the real world.  But there is also the capability in Lightwave to create real-looking scenes that could never truly be real, and to create your own worlds.
 
  
 
Objects
Fat fish1Emelia
Fat fish 2Emelia
Twisted BadEmelia
SnowmanEmelia
LighthouseHarley
Small FishHarley
TreeHarley
Ground Harley
snowHarley
 
Problems and Soluitons:

Emelia -The objects I created for the scene were the twisted perspective bed, the fat fish, and the snowman.  The two biggest problems I ran into were flipping polygons, and too many polygons at times to even move the object around due to computer lag.  I had a very hard time with the legs of the bed in particular.  Every time I would try to attach them using a boolean function, some polygons would end up flipped, and I just couldn't figure out anyway to make them work for me.  I encountered a similar problem doing the fins on the fish.  Messing around with my objects like this, I did learn a lot more about the software's tools, however, and if I were to do the objects over from scratch, I have a few ideas now of how I might make it easier on myself.  One very useful tool I discovered was the use of the metaNURBS function to sculpt out an object such as a fish's body.  It worked beautifully, however the extra polygons did slow me down a lot.

Harley -The objects that I created were the trees, the snow, the ground, the silver fish, and the lighthouse. The ground is a square that I nurbed and pulled hill out of. The snow is just hundreds of points. The tree was created by making one leaf jittering it and multiplying it hundreds of times. The lighthouse took the longest and was the most difficult object to make expressly the spiral stairs. I had to make each step one at a time, rotate, and move each one.