Ranger's main - Brian Hawkins - 20032004F - CSCI140 - Galleries - Desk Gallery

Problems and Solutions

I didn't have many problems in terms of modelling. Most of my models are quite simple and staraight forward. Most of my time was spent trying to create surfaces that reacted to the light in a realistic manner. I had a particularly difficult time with the glass materials. While looking at my lava lamp at home I noticed that the glass became less transparent and more reflective on the edges whereas the glass in my scene was the same transparency all the way around. After some experimenting I stumbled across the shaders menu and found a shader called edge transparency which allowed me to make the edges of objects (relative to camera position) opaque (more reflective) while still allowing the core of the object to remain transparent. I thought the finished effect was quite nice. I also has a little dificulty getting the window glass to look right. I originally set it up to be a flat suface as I supposed glass was, but I was getting reflections that were too clear and no diffuse light reflecting off of them. Then I added a procedural bump map with tiling of 1 ultra meter cubed. This produced the effect that I desired. It blurred the reflections in such a way that objects nearer to the plane appeared more clear than objects further away. I also had some trouble getting the lighting to look the way I wanted. I wanted the light through the window to look like the light of a full moon on a clear light. In order to get the soft shadows I desired I decided to use an area light. I then adjusted the color of the light and got the result. For the desklamp light I wanted harsher sharper shadows. For this I chose a spotlight. I had some difficulty finding an intensity setting that would keep the lamp from overpowerering the area light. When I did find the proper blending of the two lights I ran into another problem because the desklamp was unbelieveably dim. In order to correct this problem I used a solution that is often used in film and photography to make light seem more intense, volumetric lighting. I wasn't happy using this because as a rule it generally give away that the scene is fake, for this reason I tried to use it as subtley as possible. In the end I was satisfied with the result.