Ranger

CSCI 140 Desk Gallery	3-D Computer Modeling CSCI 140 Spring 2003	Thayer, Alisha
		Previous	Next

Alisha Thayer	Desk Scene
The Alchemist

INSPIRATION Finding My Muse

When I began thinking about my subject matter for this project, I found myself consistently hitting brick wall after brick wall. For some reason, I couldn't think of a subject matter that would lend well to a beginner-level 3D modeling project. As I have no prior experience with Lightwave, or any other 3D modeling program, I wanted to make sure that I did not set too lofty of goals, but I still wanted to create a scene that conveyed a story or feel, and that was aesthetically pleasing.

I felt myself, when I finally did come up with a few ideas, continuing to drift towards the theme of an alchemist's laboratory, or something of the like. However, I the thing that held me back from pursuing this right away was the #2 pencil that we had to incorporate into the scene. For some reason, in my first visualizations, I could not see a #2 pencil fitting at all. This small factor sent me back to the drawing board more times than I could count. However, after discussing the idea with Clarke, I felt more confident that the scene could work, and that the pencil would not ruin the ambiance.

Speaking of ambiance, one of the most important things that concerned me in the creation of this project was precisely that. Ambiance. What does one feel when they look at the piece? How does the composition and lighting affect the ambiance? What can I do to make it more effective?

Candlelight, I decided, was a must. I wanted the scene to be dark, a little dreary, and maybe even a little creepy. I also wanted the desk to be cluttered. In my mind, the person for which I was creating this desk was not concerned with clutter, and in fact welcomed it. I envisioned quills, strange looking bottles with even stranger looking liquids inside of them, cages, animal feet, 'spell' components, crystal balls, and candles, candles, candles. I saw skulls, knives, books, parchment, tubes . . . my list went on. However, creating all of these objects, well, lets say was a bit too challenging for my beginner skill level . . .

Objects:	Desk	Alisha
	Candles (all of them)	Alisha
	Candelabra	Alisha
	Candleholder	Alisha
	Bottles/Corks	Alisha
	Parchment	Alisha
	Marbles	Alisha
	Glass Tube	Alisha
	Books	Alisha
	Ink Well	Alisha
	Black Ball on Pedestal	Alisha
	Wine glass	Alisha
	#2 Pencil	Alisha
	Skull (minus the candle on top)	www.3Dcafe.com

Textures:	Wood90.jpg	http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/ ~pbourke/texture/
	Jeans.bmp	http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/ ~pbourke/texture/

Tutorials:	Creating a Fantasy Letter	http://www.mgfx.net/ readtutorial.php?article_id=1011
	Others from this site	http://www.3dlinks.com/ tutorials_lightwave.cfm

PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS Or, Brick Walls and Sledgehammers

Ah, the tutorial. Never in my life has one of these beauties been so valuable. But I can say right now, I would have gotten precisely no where had I not taken the time to tutorial myself out. I read tutorials on wine glasses, uses of the lathe tool, how to make flames (there's an abundance of these on the web), modeling human heads, creating effective glass (none of which were all that great) and how to make effective parchment paper (which was much harder than I would have initially thought). While many of the tutorials I read were not necessarily that great object-wise, what they did for me was point out different techniques and tools that I could use to improve my own work. There are so many buttons and settings and tools in Lightwave that it is almost impossible to figure out all of them on your own. I mean, intuition can only take you so far (especially in a program where the hotkeys have no real correlation to the tools they represent).

The biggest problem I had was creating an effective skull. I probably spent a good three to four hours trying to mold this blob of deformed polygons (which at one time, I swear, was a sphere) into something that even just remotely resembled a skull. As it is a pretty focal point in my scene, I had to have something that was at least a *little* visually pleasing. Being this was the first exposure I had ever had to the horrors that is modeling organic objects, I gave up on my hole-filled, twisted-polygon, amorphous blob of a sphere and ran to the help of 3Dcafe.com, where they had a very nice skull waiting for me.

Other than that, problems were pretty much centered around simply learning the twists and turns of Lightwave. One of my favorite hair-pulling causers was forgetting to create a new keyframe and importing a new object into the scene, and watching all of my nicely organized and composed objects suck back up to the origin. If only I had a dime for each time I did that . . . :)