Ranger's main - Lindsey Anderson - 20032004F - CSCI140 - Galleries - Desk Gallery

Problems and Solutions

As you can probably tell from my pictures, there are many objects, but they were all fairly easy to model. The hardest being the desk, and only because it took the longest to make. I have two reasons for this. First, I just wanted to get the story across without a lot of clutter. There is such a thing as too much stuff, and I have a bad habit of making my art excessively 'busy'. Second, I wanted to focus on texture and surface decoration. In fact, I think I spent more of my time in the surface editor making textures and images work than I did modeling. I found that you need to spend a lot of time in trial and error to find something that looks right. Or spend a lot of time forcing the images you import to look right. The tool I tended to use the most (besides 'Box') ended up being rail extrude. I made the frame of the desk and the spiral binding on the sketch books with it. Of course, those were the times I was able to get it to work. There was supposed to be a length of chain looping to, then running down the length of the wall between the desk and the bookcase. But due to time constraints and rail extrude not wanting to work I had to cut it out. I may go back and add that in anyway after this project is over. The hanging lamp gave me no end of trouble. I had started out trying to make a replica of one my grandma has, an old, green, glass swag lamp from the 50's. When turned on it casts green light on the walls and rainbows due to the way it was molded. I quickly found out that there was no way I would be able to model the bumpy surface of that lamp at this stage in the game. So I opted for using a preset texture, set it to a light green, and rendered it. The picture came out looking sickly, because of the green light it was casting. So I changed the color to clear glass. Then frosted glass, because you couldn't SEE the clear glass. By that time, I had a better idea of what I was doing, so finally got it set to something that could be seen and stopped messing with it.

Conclusion
Over all I am stupidly happy with this. It came out mostly the way I wanted, I learned a lot about the program, and I think I'm getting faster with the hot keys (always a good thing). If I was going to do this again, or if I had another week or two, I'd probably expand the scene to include a computer desk and more art supplies. And posters. A lot more posters. There I go, junking things up again.