CSCI 140 Final Gallery

3-D Computer Modeling 
CSCI 140 Spring 2003

Haren, John

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John HarenFinal Scene
The Nightmare Before Finals aka: The Adventures of Tara, the Littlest Goth
 
Inspiration/Story

Little girls, cartoons, and halloween: three things everybody loves.  I figured if I combined all of these, I'd have a sure-fire hit on my hands.  What I wound up with was this.  In any event, I'm good with architectural environments; geometry and measurements come easily to me.  But I wanted to experiment with posable characters, and I can't draw worth a damn.  I figured cell shading some goofy, over-the-top characters would give me space to learn without the demands of being 'realistic'.
 
 
Objects:All ObjectsJohn
 The hall, doors, stairs, clock, characters, all of it.John
 The room was based on a mansion hall tutorial I found at http://www.mgfx.net.
   
Textures:Graphic on Tara's dresshttp://www.happytreefriends.com
 Clock facehttp://www.thewoodshop.20m.com
Procedurals I threw together on my own, usually just some perlin noise here and there.
 
Problems and Solutions:

I had thought that cell shading would be relatively easy, but lemme tell you hombres, that ain't necessarily so.  Sure, if you have simple shapes with low-to-nonexistent surface convolution, and simple, bright (read: mostly ambient) lighting without ray-tracing, reflections, and whatnot, then yes, it's easy.  Unfortunately, I wanted a touch of that ol' black magic (gloomy shadows, minimal lighting, various effects) and therefore found that the shaders required a great deal of tweaking.  I used both the super cell shader and the BESM (Big Eyes, Small Mouth) anime shader and after considerable difficulty, obtained acceptable results.  A big part of my problems with the shaders is that there is very little information out there on the whys and wherefores of cell shading, so really what I wound up doing was just shooting in the dark.  In particular, the cell shaders have a pronounced tendency to 'squash' objects, making fine suface details invisible as well as flattening the apparent depth of field.  Some camera trickery corrected the DOF problems but many surfaces had to be manually corrected (with incident angle/gradient-based bump and specular maps) on a shot-by-shot basis.  This was a royal pain in the ass.  And the shadows... argh!  Sometimes ray-tracing worked, sometimes it failed in spectacular fashion.  I still don't know why.  But if ray-tracing failed, I had to use shadow maps, which introduced its own set of problems--namely the granularity was for shite.

The mansion hall itself was actually quite easy, as I found a tutorial online that had all the measurements for a (fairly accurate) repro of the Resident Evil mansion hall.  Cool, I thought, and ganked the guy's measurements.  I tweaked it quite a lot, though:  the tutorial ran riot with beveling and all kinds of unnecessary crap, and it was also too small for my purposes.  I changed scale, left out a lot of goofy things, etc... though I did follow the tutorial almost verbatim when it came to the door faces, as I liked the way they looked anyway.

And the characters... whoo.  I struggled with Tara and Jack, but you can see how I got better.  I did Tara first, and it shows.  Jack came later and looks much cleaner, I think.  The ghost was easy, of course.  What I learned of posing with skelegons is that you just HAVE to have good weight mapping on your suface polys.  Without it, all but the simplest movements badly distort the surfaces, introducing gaps, bumps, and tears which look awful in the renders (but often don't show up in GL mode--go figure).