| | | Heather Rust | | Group Scene | | Chris Fravert | | | | Brandon Coomes | | | | Mike Schulz | | | | | Koi Pond | |
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| | Inspiration
Our Fish is named James. James actually exists in real life. He is a rescue fish currently living at the Northern California Koi Rescue Center or NCKRC. NCKRC was founded ten years ago and is based in Sacramento California. We learned about James through NCKRC’s Koi of the month featured web site. James had previously resided at the office of Dr. McClure a pediatric dentist. After suffering years or torment and abuse at the hands of little children poking and pounding on James’s aquarium a concerned parent made the call to NCKRC. Now James lives a full and happy life with his rescue friends. After our presentation we will be printing out pictures of our scene which will be on sale after class. All proceeds of course will go directly to NCKRC.
Aesthetic Inspiration:
When we were first discussing what we wanted to do for our scene, throwing around various ideas, we saw a picture online of a small pond with a leaf floating in it. It looked really serene and calm, and we all agreed that it would be cool to try to create a similar type of scene. We eventually concluded that a Koi pond would be an ideal scene. It would let us create something relatively simple and uncluttered that would achieve that peaceful, Zen-like affect, and would also look good as a finished product.
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| | | Objects | Fish | Chris Fravert | | | Water | Brandon Cooms | | | Lily Pads | Heather Rust | | | Rocks | Mike Schulz |
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Fish: Chris Fravert
How:
The body of the fish was created first by an oblong ball. Using the magnet tool as well as the drag net tool, the body was shaped to have weight at the bottom and a tail. Using the size tool, I selected polygons that I desired to be the head, then used the size tool to make the head larger and more prominent. The eyes were then created by the ball tool as well. They were created in the desired flat shape and then rotated and moved into place. The fins are all created by the disc tool. Again the magnet and drag net tool were used to manipulate the disc into the desired shape. The bend tool was used to twist each fin into a natrual pose, and the body in the same manner. Last the body was smoothed out into its natrual shape by pressing the 'tab' key.
The scales texture was taken from the Internet then heavily manipulated in photoshop for the desired color, size and contrast. An achromatic bump map was also created in photoshop. These were both applied cubicly to the fish. The fins texture is a preset also heavily manipulated.
Tools:
Creation-Ball, Disc
Modify-Drag Net, Magnet, Move, Bend
Surfaces-Surface Editor, Photoshop
Time:
The creation of the fish was rather quick. The total elapsed time for the model was under 2 lab periods (about 4 hours). However, because the model was manipulated and bent into shape before the textures applied the layout portion doubled the total time to about 8 hours.
Problems and Solutions:
A major problem arrived when i moved the fish from modeler to layout. Because I already bent the fish into the desired position with the bend tool the textures would not hit the surfaces at the desired angle. The solution was to apply the image cubicly, and then modify the position and rotation of the texture. When this would not work, the desired texture was abandoned for a more simple texture that would not be influenced by the problem created by the odd shapes. I learned models should be kept static and after textures are applied; manipulated.
Water: Brandon Cooms
To try to figure out the best way to do the water, I looked at many different tutorials/guides, but most incorporated some sort of rough, wavy surface. However, for creating our water in the scene, we wanted to make sure that we would be able to clearly see the actual objects through the water. So that automatically ruled out having a wavy, ocean-type surface, and instead I had to create a smooth surface. The smooth surface was achieved by having a bump map with a high degree of smoothing, using a trial and error process till a satisfactorily smooth surface was achieved. Another problem was when we did test renders with our final lighting; the water was really blue from reflecting the SkyTracer2 environment, which in turn obscured the detail of the underwater objects. This was fixed by increasing the transparency of the water, which made the water clearer and less reflective of the sky.
Lily Pads: Heather Rust
The lily pads were created in three main parts. The first part was creating a disc. Once the disk was created and sized to my liking I then selected all of the polygons and used the subdivide tool to round out the lily pad. Secondly I found a texture online and downloaded it. I applied the texture using the texture editor. The third step was to create a flower to sit on top of the lily pads. The flower was created by making a rectangle and subdividing it twice. Then moving the sides (using the move tool) I shaped the rectangle to look like a single pedal. I then made four copies of the pedal and pasted them onto different layers. Once the pedals were on different layers I moved them to form a flower, then pasted them onto the original layer. Lastly I added three small balls to the center of the flower (as lily’s often have in their center).
I wanted to use UV mapping to create the texture of the lily pads which is essentially pasting a picture onto an object. What I found was that all of the pictures of lily pads on line were too small, and even pictures that I took with my digital camera (which I had to go to many different pet stores to find) were too distorted. The texture I downloaded from the web was fine but I would have liked to use UV.
References:
Lily Texture:
http://www.mayang.com/textures/Nature/html/Plants%20and%20Derived%20Materials/Leaves/
Flower: Flowers Tutorial by Bee Thao
Rocks: Mike Schulz
My rocks were used using the tessellated ball tool. I moved the points around and subdivided the polygons. To do this I used a tutorial online. Through trial and error I was able to create the various rocks used in our scene. The main problem I had was trying to make rocks that were the right size and shape. My solution was to experiment until I got what I needed.
References: http://www.texturespace.com/tutorials/quick_and_dirty_rocks.pdf
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| | Time Frame
The creation of the fish was rather quick. The total elapsed time for the model was under 2 lab periods (about 4 hours). However, because the model was manipulated and bent into shape before the textures applied the layout portion doubled the total time to about 8 hours.
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![](javascript:launchRemote("../../../../../album/2004F/GroupScenes/KoiKrew1.jpg"))
