| | | Russell Robbins | | Desk Scene | | | Alien Invader Desk & Office | |
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| | Inspiration
After reading a Calvin and Hobbes comic book, I couldn’t take on this project without wanting to amp it up a little. Bill Watterson always goes over the top with his cartoons; every theme he embellishes to push the humor. Before coming to class, I read one of his cartoons about a race of slug-beings that were out to annihilate the earth in their ship. The drawing included the alien captain on the “bridge” with cables, screens, pipes, steam, panels, rivets and steel everywhere. Since Clark was encouraging us to be creative and push the story, I thought I’d put as much detail into my scene as possible, tell the story, and still do it in the short time we had. It’s your basic high-ranking, conquering alien general’s desk with throne-style chair and a horrible console on the desktop to carry out whatever diabolical commands our alien general sees fit to dispense.
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| | | Objects | Desk | Russell Robbins | | | Lamp | Russell Robbins | | | Room | Russell Robbins | | | Chair | Russell Robbins | | | Papers | Russell Robbins | | | Banner | Russell Robbins | | | Scene cards | Russell Robbins | | | Chalice | Russell Robbins | | | Pencil | Russell Robbins | | | | | | Images | Nebula image | www.sct-user.brainiac.com/flame-nebula-EAyres.jpg | | | Earth image | www.starryskies.com/articles/2003/08/earth.jpg | | | Other images | Russell Robbins with Photoshop or CorelDraw |
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| | Problems and Solutions
These were all created by me. I kept many objects within the layers of “Desk” so I wouldn’t have to position them in Layout later.
One main challenge in the modeling process of the desk was interpreting its curvilinear structure. Using the sketch tool and extruding the complicated front face of the desk didn’t work; if that face was to be curved later by using the bend tool, it would have to be subdivided (tripled) first, but that caused smoothing errors and created seams where the tripled polygons were. Instead, I created a desk-sized box and subdivided it (you could use the bend tool on it without smoothing errors) and carved away large hunks of it by using the Boolean subtract method. The result was a much cleaner desk that could be safely bent without the polygons becoming non-planar or smoothing errors happening.. T
Every time I did the Boolean work, however, I named the new surface something new, thinking that perhaps I could put detail on each face that was created. This made my surface list VERY long, as you might imagine. Time was beginning to run out, so I ended up loading the brushed chrome surface from the library onto all those surface names. It took a little while.
The rafters posed some difficulty. I smooth-shifted them out from the existing geometry of the room (created with the capsule tool). Then I found that I couldn’t do the same with the geometry on the ends of the capsule, where the rafters were supposed to be spaced evenly around the pit with the railing. To solve this, I copied and pasted half of one successful rafter and rotated it on the Y-axis to position it correctly. The curve of the rafter didn’t match, however, so I stretched it a bit to a close approximation of the contour of the room. I mirrored that rafter to the other side of the room and welded some of the points in the center to eliminate the seams. The final touch was to use the Boolean tool to cut the holes in the rafters.
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