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Clarke Steinback Ph.D.	3D Computer Modeling CSCI 140 Spring 2004	HMK Inc
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Daniel Hirsmuller-Counts		Group Scene
Christopher Maggitti
Dan Krieger
	Forgotten Battle


	Inspiration We knew that we wanted an outside scene and something to do with an old fashioned battle (swords, bows, etc.). We couldn't really decide between Eastern or Western styles of armor and weaponry, so we decided to do both. Shooting for a time period near feudal Japan and European medieval times, we figured that a clash between East and West had to have happened at least once, and more than likely on Asian soil than not. So with the basic idea in hand, we set off to capture the landscape of a common grass plain in Japan and a motely assortment of arms and armor. Realism was our main focus in the creation of the renders... providing a sense of depth to the landscape and rusty detail with the weaponry. Story: Imagine, if you will, a time of samurai and knights. The Western kings of europe are bent on eastward expansion into the calm, fertile lands of Asia and are ever pushing into the bounds of the Japanese empire. One such battle occurs in a setting of a rolling Japanese grassland plain complete with flowing stream. Mass chaos, scorched ground, the stream runs red with the blood of fallen warriors from both parties. Arms litter the field in a vast array. Now fast forward 40 years to the same field. Japan has long since pushed back the Western invaders and the land is now healed. Peace reigns over the plain and the stream is clear clear once more. The only hints remaining of the battle are the scattered and rusted objects of the dead, who have long since been scavenged to nothingness.

Objects	foreground landmass	Chris
	water mass	Chris
	wooden rope bridge	Chris
	helm	Daniel H.
	shield	Daniel H.
	arrow 1	Daniel H.
	arrow 2	Daniel H.
	arrow 3	Daniel H.
	rusty axe	Daniel H.
	crappy sword	Dan K.
	crossbow	Dan K.
	katana	Dan K.
	sword 1	Dan K.
	sword 2	Dan K.
	wakizashi	Dan K.
	background hills	Kurt Larsen & Sybil Media
	higan trees	Greentree
	acer trees	Greentree

Textures	foreground land	Chris
	water ripples	Chris
	katana handle	Dan K.
	feather fletching 1	Roy Steves & Daniel H.
	feather fletching 2	Roy Steves & Daniel H.
	feather fletching 3	Roy Steves & Daniel H.
	metal rust	Daniel H.
	wood	http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/texture
	shield emblem	http://www.molloy.org
	acer trees	Greentree


	Problems and Solutions Chris - My main duty was handling the landscaping and scene compiling. The first big road block came with our main component...Sasquatch Lite. Like many pros will do, half the tutorials I found, while very similar in content, usually forgot to put in the easy but essential steps to get the plug to render correctly (yes - scene>effects>imageprocess>addpixelfilter>saslite - don't forget it!). Luckily...from the tutorial I found, I could sort of glean the workings of Skytracer2 and deform mapping as well. Much of Skytracer2 is still mystery to me because of its depth, but I feel that I have a pretty fair handle on Saslite and deform mapping for the time being. Thankfully I was able to tweak the settings just enough to get the lighting effects I wanted. The scene contains only two lights, both spotlights and the layout over all is fairly simple (once the modeling and tweaking was finished of course). The rope bridge didn't really present any problems except for bending and twisting of the ropes... but most of that problem was solved with a higher polygon count and slowing down of my modeling process. Dan K. - Having 3 seperate directories for our group, plus the flashdisk's ability to take on any drive letter possible made loading files in Lightwave a PAIN. In the case of our project, it took longer to find all the files for loading up the scene, than it took to render the scene itself. Poor lightwave lacked the ability to find files in relative position to the scene file, which would make a lot of sense in its design, which caused most time to be spent loading a scene properly, which caused production delays Having everybody work on their own stuff and the eventual integration served to be the worst problem. While the obvious things that should have popped up, actually didn't (like scaling of objects), problems like missing files and up-to-dateness cropped up and caused issues. Then there was some mystery about files existing on some computers, and not on others, even though the flashdisk was the same and was unaltered... another of those computer mysteries I suppose. I started off by creating a crappy sword for Daniel to test metal aging effects on. The sword was named "crappy sword", and while it was not intended to make its way into our scene, it did. The sword I did plan on making came from a sketch design to create a very sharp and crisp looking hilt on a sword, I managed to create it with the best of my abilities, and then moved on to the japanese style swords, which meant i had to do a bit of research on size and style of japenese weapons. After several attempts to get it right, I did finally come to something that closely matched the pictures i used for reference. Then there was the crossbow, which was a pain to create, since there seemed to be made crossbow styles in medieval europe, so making a decision on what type to use for what type period was complex. I settled on a "classic" style and modeled it out. Final task was to make a broken axe.. so that the handle appeared to have been snapped in half, with fraying and cracking effects that look realistic. Lightwave made it very difficult to mimic the style I used in 3dsmax to accomplish the same thing, but i worked out my differences with Lightwave (although neither Lightwave or myself have apologized for tensions) and it proved to be helpful once I managed the find the proper technique for completing the task. Daniel H. Keeping up to date files with everyone in the group, was extremely hard especially with the way windows assigns drive letters. Each machine I worked on would assign a different drive letter to my flash drive. So when I tied to load a scene in Lightwave it had to ask me for most of the objects and a few of the textures every time I loaded the scene. I ended up with multiple copies of the scene for each computer I worked on. This ended up being 3 files one for the machines which labeled my drive g:, e:, and f: respectively. A small problem I encountered was scaling all my models so they had the same scale relative to my other models. My solution was paying more attention when creating an object with a radius value. It turned out that all my problems stemmed from using radius values that should have been diameter values. I was quite embarrassed. I modeled many of the European weapons and armor. Then I used the techniques I learned from the tutorial on the Darkling Simulations page in conjunction with their Simbiont shader for Lightwave, to surface all the weapons and armor in our scene. This consisted of creating a custom weight map for each object and applying the Simbiont shader properly. To insure that all the arrows would not look the same, I created three different versions of the arrow and used modified versions of the feather texture for the fletching.


	References Saslite and Landscape http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/surface/environments/ Metal Rust/Weightmapping http://www.darksim.com/tutorial/html/tslw2_wmap.html


	Time Frame Not provided.



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