CSCI 140 Group Gallery

3-D Computer Modeling 
CSCI 140 Fall 2002

Preparing for a Quest

Previous Group Next Group
Brendan Mauro
Parker Howell
DJ Robinson
Pat Bailey

Preparing for a Quest
by
Dark Age Productions / Medieval Modeling Society		Group Scene
 
Story:

Come, journey back to a time when dragons and sorcery still live. To a time where Merlin, King Arthur and his knights still roam the castle of Camelot. Welcome to Camelot, as we speak our noble warriors are getting ready for a journey. We will now take you to the room where they were dining and discussing the dangers and perils of their next mission. Merlin has foretold of the trails that protect the holy artifact that they are about to quest for. The first trial is gaining entrance into the cave, through the Dark forest where, what goes in has never come out. Local villagers tell stories to their children of the beasts that have come out of the forest of untold evil and power. Deep within the forest lays the cave, in which cave trolls, orcs and imps have made it their home. Last but not least the guardian of the artifact. It has the body, agility, and grace of a cat with six legs, but the power and size of a dragon. This Dragon Cat stands at about six feet high on all six legs, but when it fully spread it can reach up to twelve feet. Along with the power and strength it also has powerful magic that even rivals that of Merlin. Only one thing could have this much protection for a quest and that is, The Quest for the Holy Grail.
 
  
 
Objects
Table candleholders and candlesPat
CandelabraPat
ShieldsPat
GobletPat
PlatesPat
ArrowParker
AxeParker
BowParker
Chain MaceParker
ChandelierParker
DaggerParker
HalberdParker
Hand AxeParker
LanceParker
SpearParker
SwordParker
Room ArchitectureBrendan
FireplaceBrendan
Weapon RacksBrendan
Round TableDJ
Knight's ChairsDJ
ThroneDJ
 
Textures
Shield imagesPat edited images from www.kingarthursknights.com
Maphttp://gate.henry-davis.com/MAPS/EMwebpages/EML.html
Woodwww.3dcafe.com (edited by Brendan)
Stone WallsBrendan
TableBrendan
ScrollsBrendan
 
Tutorials
Creating flameshttp://www.lightwave3d.com/tutorials/specialfx/volumetric_fire/volumetric_fire.html
 
Problems and solutions

Problems with making shields (Pat)
First I made the shield body by bending a box for the left half of the shield (the box had about 15 segments). I selected and copied the points around the edge of the shield to use as the rail (path) for the 'rail extrude' tool in order to make the rim of the shield. But rail extrude would not work. We tried several approaches but none worked. I ended up putting the shield in the background and using it as a template for creating new points in the foreground layer. This worked fine but was more work than it should have been.

Shield images (Pat)
I projected the images onto the shields in the standard way (using planar) but the images were very fuzzy. DJ suggested rendering them to see if they improved. I did and they did - dramatically.

Curling the corners of the map (Pat)
I tried creating curled corners for the map paper, a .1" thick box, by using the knife tool to create segments with their lengths along the direction of the curl - see figure 1 - then using the 'bend' tool to curl the corner. This didn't work well. The curl looked distorted. Clarke suggested creating a mesh as in figure 2. This worked a lot better but still doesn't look great, so we went with a simpler version.

Figure 1 & 2
Shield images (Pat)
I projected the images onto the shields in the standard way (using planar) but the images were very fuzzy. DJ suggested rendering them to see if they improved. I did and they did - dramatically.

Curling the corners of the map (Pat)
I tried creating curled corners for the map paper, a .1" thick box, by using the knife tool to create segments with their lengths along the direction of the curl - see figure 1 - then using the 'bend' tool to curl the corner. This didn't work well. The curl looked distorted. Clarke suggested creating a mesh as in figure 2. This worked a lot better but still doesn't look great, so we went with a simpler version.

Too many polygons (Pat)
I created some objects using the lathe tool that had too many polygons. I didn't notice the problem on my home computer because it is a fast machine with lots of RAM (1.7 ghtz with 768 MB) but when I loaded the objects on the lab computers it took a long time to just pan and zoom. I used the polygon reduction tool, which worked well but I still had too many polygons so I recreated the objects with fewer segments. I originally used 24 segments but reduced it to 12. The main lesson here is that for objects that will not be seen up close in the scene, do not create them with great detail and/or really smooth surfaces.

Weapon creation (Parker)
I really didn't experience any major problems.  This time around I saved often and in multiple locations.  The only problem if you want to call it that was making irregular shapes.  Two that come to mind are the blades of weapons and the piece of the Bow that connects the handle to the Limb.  Both of these pieces were make by dragging individual points to their desired locations.  So it wasn't really a problem just a time consuming nuisance.  

Bringing it together (Brendan)
As I was responsible for the layout portion of the project, most of my problems came from there.  Firstly, everyone had made some great detailed objects, each with plenty of polygons.  So many polygons, in fact, that by the time we had got about half of them on the screen layout was slowed down to a crawl, even on my 1ghz with 576mb ram.  Therefore much of the later placement of objects and editing of lights was quite tedious and required much patience.

Speaking of lights, that's probably the worst of what I had trouble with.  I wanted to make this scene look good, and ended up using about 60+ lights to do this.  As far as I can tell at this point, Lightwave has no way to edit properties of many items at once, thus every light had to be adjusted individually, and trust me there was a lot of adjusting.  I finally ended up with something that I was relatively satisfied with, though I still think it could be better.

For some time the lighting was giving me hell because it seemed the underside of most objects were lit from some unknown source.  I finally pinpointed it to the flames in the fireplace, which I had created with a textured volumetric distant light (see tutorial above).  Even though it was just in the fireplace, the fact that it was a distant light meant that it was spread across the entire scene.  I solved the problem by un-checking 'affect diffuse' and 'affect specularity' from the light properties.