Ranger's main - Nighthawks - 20032004S - CSCI140 - Galleries - Group Gallery

Problems and Solutions

Tyler:

My objects that I created were actually quite easy. I did a street lamp with the lathe tool, as well as a salt and pepper shaker, coffee maker and a drinking glass. I created a cigarette in modeler by creating a disc, and knifing the areas I wanted as different colors. I created the street and side walk by stretching the polygons, thanks go out to Brendan! I wanted to do something new for this. After watching Brendan's tutorial on bmp maps I decided to do a bmp map for the street and the sidewalk. I added pot holes to the street by going to Aura and creating black circles on a white surface, for the sidewalk I created a thick black line on a white surface. After that it was just helping out where needed.

Jenny:

After all the assignments had been made it occurred to me that I was only working in layout, I didn't have an object to make. This was the first problem, so after some thinking we decided that I should make the building in the back. After making the top portion of the building I began to work on the lower layer. I tried to take the short cut and just Boolean subtract the lower layer from the top layer but Lightwave decided that shortcuts aren't ok and wouldn't let me do this. So after some deliberation I decided to create the room as a whole. With help from the desk scene I created a room and then put the two buildings together.

One other problem I came across was how to light the street lamp. I couldn't get it to light properly but then I went to Item Properties and changed the luminosity and smoothing and then the street lamp looks very close to a real street lamp.

Esther:

I began this project knowing absolutely nothing about how to design an accurate counter for our scene. I tried to find tutorials about counter design, but found the task very difficult because of the unique shape. The triangular shaped counter had to be precise because it is one of the main parts of our scene. For the first two weeks I tried designing it free hand that proved to be very difficult because the bar had to bend in three different places which meant it had to have a bunch of different sections which means millions of polygons it would have taken a lifetime to render! Luckily, Brendan and Dr. Steinbeck introduced me to the lathe tool. This was my savior! In the end, the entire counter scene probably had less than twenty polygons. The most difficult part of making the counter was definitely figuring out the best way to bend both the base and countertops in an accurate way. Otherwise it was just a matter of making boxes. I hadn't anticipated the difficulty of the task, but definitely learned a lot because of it. Texturing wasn't so much of a problem because we needed a wood texture which was provided to us by Lightwave.

Scott:

When I first designed the building I designed all of the walls as one long strait wall. The next step was using the bend tool to get all of the layers that made up the building to bend in proportion to one another. This was a lot more difficult then I thought because I was working from a painting and didn't have actual measurements. When I began bending the building to match the painting I had a real hard time keeping everything looking right. Another problem that I had was with the textures. I wanted the textures to look like the painting and couldn't get the look that I wanted by using modeler. I ended up using Photoshop to select each texture individually. I went back into modeler and loaded the JPEG images as the textures for my building. The ending result was much better then my earlier attempts.