Ranger's main - Andre Nguyen - 20032004S - CSCI140 - Galleries - Desk Gallery

Problems and Solutions

This project was fun and educational. Lightwave isn't exactly that user friendly, and being without a full Windows interface is the first clue. The tools themselves were a bit hard to use, as was the case in trying to deform the paper a little. I used the magnet tool and found that dragging the edge of the plane was a lot harder than dragging near the center. I'm not sure why, but also, on one of the pieces of paper on the desk, parts of the polygons can be seen outlined in black. Only in Layout was this apparent, as in Modeler the object looks fine and is barely even distorted. The other problem was that the glass jar was set to 0% translucency, and yet the pencil and desk were hardly visible behind it after the full render. The only way to combat this was to render the image without all the ray tracing options (except for shadows, which was left on) and I took the two images into Photoshop and 'shopped the pencil in a little from the plain render, even though it was slightly there.

Although the story is a little ambiguous, I couldn't have the lighting be that way. I had some trouble positioning the light inside the lamp shade, as the fluorescent tube wasn't fully transparent (and full transparency didn't look right), so the light actually comes out from slightly in front of the tube, but it still works. The light from outside matches the color of the sky and creates shadows from the blinds as I initially imagined it. The only lighting problem was with the wall with the window. That wall lit up very brightly, from the fluorescent light. I couldn't have the desk any darker, so the diffuse on that wall is the lowest of all the walls, to combat how bright it was. Some quick observations are that the fully rendered image is darker than the image in Layout or a quick simple render. Another oddity is that even though all the objects are to 100% scale, it's hard to move around in Layout when you're trying to make ssmall increments, so you have to revert to the numeric input.

Other than those problems, I enjoyed the project and learned a lot.