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Problems and Solutions

Francisco says: At first when we started this project I assumed an underwater scene was going to be simpler than I thought. We began with researching; looking up how to do tutorials, viewing what other people have done, getting realistic imagesand so on. In this process I found an excellent tutorial listed above on underwater scenes. I did the tutorial and although I was able to get close to duplicating the effects, that the author created, I ran into several problems. Most of them having to do with me not having enough knowledge of the Lightwave. Like you may have experienced yourself, many of these tutorial authors leave out bits and pieces of the steps. All this meant was I had to do some homework, and exploration of Lightwave. In doing so it pushed me to find out what Lightwave layout's tools did. This also allowed me to gain control of the effects we wanted to create. Many of the effects the tutorial did for one reason or another didn't quite give the results I was hoping, Like, using lights to project images into the scene, it was just to low resolution. To solve this I simply added a image map onto the object itself (you can see this on the ground). Another problem was using a deform map to make the ground, it works perfectly if you don't want to much control on the ground, or don't want it shaped to specifics. To resolve this I actually, built a box in Modeler and deformed it myself with the magnet tool. You can recognize this on the ground; my reasoning for this was that I wanted to create a smooth platform for the city, with the ground sloping up. Things I'd like to add is a volumetric light from above to create rays into the scene, and use a Heatwave filter to create a wavy effect, but unfortunately this filter is only assessable if you purchase it at Worley Labs for a very expensive price.

Alyssa says: When I took on the assignment of designing a shark, I was very excited. Designing the shark was not easy at first, but after a few tries at getting the right shapes involved with the body and fins, it all started to come together. The tutorials that I found off the internet helped me organize the layout of the shark, although they were not directly used for the design.

Bruce says: When I was drawing sketches to figure out how big I was going to make each object, I wrote down metric estimations of how big each building should be. When it came time to create the objects, I exceeded the bounding box I made for myself. This wasn't really a problem, just more of an inconvenience. I'm usually pretty good with creating objects to scale. Also, when I was scaling some of the parts of the buildings, round columns became elliptic and I didn't notice until after it was too late to fix. Another bump in the road was the window placement on some of the buildings. Some buildings have tunnels that run into a window. All I had to do to fix it was cut the window at the correct spot and change the texture on the other half.

Conclusions:

This was an enjoyable project. There were many different ways to create the underwater feel, and we believe that we made a good choice and were able to produce the scene that we wanted. Like everyone we started out with wanting to have a lot more objects and more detailed effects, but as time went on, things had to be cut. We feel like we were well organized as a group and worked well together.