| | | Kevin Kim | | Desk Scene | | | What a Mess | |
| |
|
| | Inspiration
When the desk scene was first assigned to us, I sat down to sketch out a rough draft of what I wanted. For inspiration, I looked at my own desk, but found that it was covered in so much trash and papers that I had to clean it up before getting an idea of how my desk looks geometrically. I decided to take my messy desk and try to represent what most college students’ desks look like. I started with the required items and found I was quickly running out of time. So instead of an accurate representation of how my desk looks, I could only make it about half as messy as it actually is.
| |
|
|
| | | Objects | Desk | Kevin Kim | | | Glass | Kevin Kim | | | Pencil | Kevin Kim | | | Desk Lamp | Kevin Kim | | | Stack of Paper | Kevin Kim | | | Loose Paper | Kevin Kim | | | | | | Textures | Carpet | Lightwave preset of grass with slight modifications | | | Walls | image from http://www.mayang.com | | | Desk Wood | either from http://www.mayang.com or http://www.3dcafe.com | | | Images on paper | Kevin Kim (taken from PSSC course zeroxes) | | | Poster | http://www.art.com | | | Paper texture | http://solidhardware.com/sn/?lw1 | | | Coke Can Image | http://www.3dluvr.com |
| |
|
| | Problems and Solutions
My main problem with this assignment was the time constraint. It took me a while to obtain a copy of Lightwave for use at home. A lot of time in the early labs was spent watching and learning from tutorials, and I felt like I was left with half as much time to complete the project.
The first obstacle I came across was setting up the layout. It took me a long time of tinkering around to figure it all out. My lighting was not quite right, I couldn’t figure out how to move the objects accurately in the layout, I couldn’t figure out how to change perspectives or add perspectives, and the list goes on. There was no other way than to keep twiddling with the program and figure these things out. Lab times were helpful when I could ask when I came up to the problem, but most of the time I’d be at home and have to figure it out on my own.
A huge problem I came across concerning the mechanics of the program was that I did not know I had to press Enter Enter after modifying an object in the layout. I would spend a lot of time positioning all my new objects into the scene and have them all revert to their starting positions when I tried a test render. Finally I just gave up and worked on the textures of my objects and waited until I could ask someone about what was going on.
Textures was another problem I encountered. I had trouble finding good textures for the walls. I wanted a stucco look, but could not find any tutorials on the matter. I finally settled with an image I found online. The image wasn’t very well done in that it wasn’t meant to be repeated on a surface. So I had to turn down the opacity to make it less apparent that the image was repeating on the walls.
Lighting was another problem I came across. I began with a spotlight as my “ambient” light and a point light in my lamp. I didn’t like how the spotlight was making the scene look like a movie set though. So I replaced it with a point light, and also increased the global lighting. As for the lamp, I did not like the way the point light looked in the lamp, so I opted for a spotlight. And while playing around with the lighting options, I liked how lens flare looked so decided to use it. It reminded me of the old lamp my sister had from the 80’s that was blindingly bright when you looked at it.
After changing my lamp light, I found out that it was going through my desk. After asking a friend about this, he told me to assign layers for each component of my desk because sometimes Lightwave can’t find the edges of polygons that well. After doing this, the lamp light no longer shined through my desk.
Conclusion
As with my projects in CSC 40, I wish I had more time to work on these projects. I am very happy with how the scene came out since it was my first modeling assignment. However, I feel that I could improve it immensely with some more time. I thought that I spent the majority of this project’s time figuring out how to use Lightwave and learning the very basics of it, so my overall desk scene was not as fine tuned as I hoped. Overall, I am satisfied with my work, and even more satisfied with how much I learned from the assignment.
Tutorials
Lamp Neck www.niklasindustries.com/tutorials/tut_pipes
Lamp Head and Cup www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/modeling/modeling/cup.html
Glass aspect http://www.puppydoodle.biz/tutorials/LW6_WineGlass_Part_Two.htm
Wood texturing http://www.puppydoodle.biz/tutorials/LW6_WineGlass_Part_Two.htm
Paper Stack http://solidhardware.com/sn/?lw1 | |
|
|
|
![](javascript:launchRemote("../../../../../album/2004S/DeskScenes/KevinKim1.jpg"))
