CSCI 140 Group Gallery

3-D Computer Modeling 
CSCI 140 Fall 2002

Melee in Space

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Daniel Vang
Joel Kruger
Mike Wong
Aaron Wittman

Melee in Space
by
Spaced Guys		Group Scene
 
Inspiration:

Our inspiration came from ideas obviously rooted in science fiction. When first assigned this project, all 4 of us immediately knew we were going to do a space scene of some sort. After a discussion of ideas that ranged from distant planets to wormholes, we settled on a space battle of some sort.

Each person in our group contributed their little piece of creativity, and no idea was overlooked until a viable discussion was had. Our combined influences range from an episode of the Muppet Babies (obviously pertaining to outer space) to sci-fi film classics to the game of Asteroids on Atari 2600. Each of us took a different approach to creating our ships, resulting in the three different ship classes and the space station seen in our renderings.

Story:

As Rod Stewart once shouted Every picture tells a story, don't it? Well this one does. We have a space station that was positioned outside of an asteroid belt, doing scientific research on the gravitational effects of asteroids on the hemoglobin of Sector IX macro organisms. They obtained these Sector IX macro organisms from a slave trader (and smuggler, but that's another story altogether) who was captured in another combat, and exposed the location of the Sector IX macro organisms to a clan of bounty hunters hired to assimilate the species. The bounty hunter ships are the green and black fellas.

The station is being defended by the small armada of ships on hand (the gray ones with the yellow cockpit glass), but is virtually destroyed at the point that this picture was taken. There are still a couple gray guys out there trying to avenge their lost buddies.

The blue guys were just out on a Friday night cruisin' the asteroid belt, looking for trouble. That they found when they came across this little melee and decided to join in, shooting at whatever would fly past 'em. They also thought it fun to take pot-shots at the space station while cruising by it.
 
 
 
Objects
AsteroidsWong, Vang, Kruger
Space StationKruger
Blue Space ShipsVang
Green Space ShipsWong
Gray Space ShipsWittman
StarfieldWong, Vang
LasersWong
ExplosionsVang, Wong, Kruger, Wittman
 
Technical Aspects/Problems:

There were many problems that we encountered.  First of all we wanted to do something that wasn't too hard, so we excluded anything organic.  We wanted to keep things simple.

Our first feat was asteroids.  We tried to use Booleans and tried to do many things to create the asteroids.  Daniel started to read tutorial on procedural maps, and that came in very handy.  To make an asteroid we just applied a crumple procedural map to a mis-shaped sphere.  

We had another problem, How would we make flames coming out of our ships to create movement?  The easiest and most convenient was using a cone then applying a fade texture to it.

Our next problem was light but that just took a little tweaking.  The last problem we hit was trying to get explosions.   This was quite hard.  We decided to use volumetric lighting as explosions.   Although the down fall of volumetric light is the intense processor usage.  Sometimes computers would crash.  

Despite most of problems we used Lightwave's capability to solve and create most of our problems.