CSCI 140 Final Gallery

3-D Computer Modeling 
CSCI 140 Spring 2003

Thayer, Alisha

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Alisha ThayerFinal Scene
Self Portrait (of sorts)
 
Inspiration:

As usual, finding inspiration on this project was a little more difficult than I had initially planned on.  I bounced around numbers of ideas-- neat looking churches, libraries, studies, throne rooms, you name it.  While all of them seemed fun and interesting, none of them seemed interesting enough to get me really going on them. So, I found myself sort of drifting from idea to idea for the first week or so of the project.  Wanting to clear my mind a little, I cracked open my "Inside Lightwave 7" book (the 1000+ page one) and decided to start working on a tutorial on modeling a human head.  While the process that the book suggested was amazingly time-consuming and difficult, I found myself really having a lot of fun, and in a spur of the moment decision, I was suddenly doing a self portrait as my final project for this class. Fortunately,  I realized how involved this project had become, and I ended up spending every (and I mean *every*) free moment that I had working on getting the model just right.  Unfortunately, using every free moment to work on this project left little time for the other time-consuming projects that I had lined up for me. I could have spent probably twice the time playing with points and polygons, texturing and lighting, getting everything *just* right, but I had to create a cut-off point. I learned a very valuable lesson with this project:  You have to learn to say, "This is good enough."  Otherwise, the project never gets done.

Which brings me to resemblance.  Towards the end of the project, I realized that it was almost impossible for the time constraints that I was presented with to get a perfect resemblance to my face, so I focused more on making it look nice rather than making it look like me. I do realize that there isn't a perfect resemblance, but I am still happy with the way that it turned out, though, of course, there are a number of things that I'd love to change.
 
  
 
Objects:Head (hair, eyes, et cetera)Alisha
 
Textures:133-3392.jpgAlisha (Taken at upper park)
 eyedetail.psdAlisha
 Image13.gifAlisha (modified from “Creating Polygon Hair” Tutorial)
 MyFace.psdAlisha
 Skintile2.jpgAlisha
 testface.psdAlisha
lips4copy.gifAlisha
   
References:Inside Lightwave 7- Dan Ablan (New Riders)
 Creating Polygon Hairhttp://www.newtek.com/products/ lightwave/tutorials/modeling/hair/index.html
 
Problems And Solutions:

I learned a number of valuable techniques on this project when it comes to modeling organic figures.  The "Inside Lightwave 7" book gives an extremely in depth tutorial on a powerful technique for modeling not only heads, but practically anything.  

What I found most amazing about this technique is you end up using probably a grand total of five or so tools.  The "Extrude" tool becomes your best friend, as it allows you to take a line of points and create a set of polygons that you can extend the shape with.  Only a few times to you actually lay down points and create polygons with them, most of your time is spent creating new, extended polygons from the old ones.

Texturing was one of the most difficult endeavors that I think I've ever undertaken.  Though I did have a reference picture that I could work off of to get skin textures and what not, it was still amazingly difficult to make the face look even remotely right.  I ended up in the end taking a skin tile texture that I made for a base, and accentuating it with an overlay of the original picture that I had taken.  This, I figured, would be the best way to get all of the skin color changes on my face as accurate as possible, as completely re-doing them from scratch would have been remarkably time consuming, and I don't think the results would have been even in the same ball park.  I also threw a number of these textures into the Bump, Luminosity, Diffuse et cetera channels.

The background of the scene itself is just an image of Upper Park that I had taken about year ago.  I decided to composite the scene for two reasons: 1) time constraints, and 2) render times.  As it was, the head itself (1024x768 resolution, Enhanced High Anti-aliasing) took five hours to render due to the fact that the hair consisted of 50,000 transparent polygons.  

All in all, I am proud of the way the project turned out, and while I'd love to work on it more, it is at a point where I can call it "mostly-done."