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2006 Spring ->3D Computer Modeling ->Galleries ->Desk Gallery ->Jeremiah Jones
| | | Jeremiah Jones | | Desk Scene | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Hostage Scene, sans Hostages | |
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| | Inspiration
I wanted to do something similar to those scenes in crappy movies where the terrorists have hostages in some hirise office building late at night and the cops are on the ground trying to keep the renegade cop who plays by his own rules from barging in and shooting up the place. There is a single spotlight trained on the window, the blinds are closed, and stuff has been thrown about. Too bad there aren't any people to make the scene more effective, but I can't even draw 2D people, so let's just say all the 3D people are on the other side of the room. Yeah, that's it. Maybe the scene is from the perspective of one of the hostages that got out of line and got whacked upside the head with a pistol. That's why it's at a weird angle. Yeah. Actually, I wanted it to look weird, like everything was in disarray, but it takes more than 4 objects to really connote disarray. I originally wanted to do something very surrealistic or bizarre, but I quickly found that I was not as creative as I once was. After a few time-consuming false starts I settled on this scene. I am really pleased with how the blinds came out. They were originally supposed to be venetian blinds, but after placing about 20 slats the way venetian blinds were supposed to go I saw that I was going to get a whole bunch of moire patterns, which were definitely cool, but weren't what I wanted. Rather than scratch three hours of modelling I decided to try for vertical blinds, since they were thicker and placed closer together compared to their width. This resulted in the nice bands of light and dark that I wanted. I really like the way the translucency shows the slight blue of the spotlight. The desk's shadows are pretty good, too. I wanted to have the top-left leg broken a bit, with splinters and jagged edges, to give its huge shadow a better feel. Maybe the leg could be partially hanging on, dangling, or cocked at an unnatural angle. I really like the shadows on the blinds, where the light shows through part of each slat.
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| | | Objects | Desk | Jeremiah J. Jones | | | Lamp | Jeremiah J. Jones | | | Blinds | Jeremiah J. Jones | | | Walls | Jeremiah J. Jones | | | Glass | Jeremiah J. Jones | | | Pencil | Jeremiah J. Jones | | | Window | Jeremiah J. Jones |
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| | | Textures | Overcast.tga | lightwave Images\Weather\StormStuff | | | wallbump.IFF | lightwave Images\structures | | | LightOakSm.tga | lightwave Images\Wood | | | blue and gray.bmp | Jeremiah J. Jones |
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| | Problems and Solutions
1. Figuring out what I wanted. The objects themselves weren't hard, once I knew how I wanted them to look. Many false starts and experiments don't show up in this scene, but they took a great deal of time. I made at least four glasses before I even got around to making them look like glass. I spent a good ten hours in layout with just three objects, trying to get the objects to look right. I didn't solve this once and for all, but I found that it is best to take a general idea and try to work with it immediately so I can see what will and won't work right away, then adjust my approach accordingly. With the glass, I found that using a disk with eight sides looks a lot better than using ten or more sides. I wanted the glass to look like the short, thick glasses my dad has. They're great for holding a small amount of liquid with a few ice cubes, and make a satisfying sound when the ice rattles around.
2. Getting the arm of the lamp to look right. When modelling the lamp I knew how to make the shade and base. The shade is just a modified cone, and the base is just a box with cylindrical sections removed. I wasn't sure how to make a nice curve like the arm of a lamp, but I immediately thought of the spline tool. It was quick to get the curve I wanted, but there was a problem: it was just a curved line. If I could make it thicker it would be easy, but I couldn't find anything to do that, so I thought "hey, it's basically a bent tube" and set about creating a tube to bend. I put the spline on one layer and made a cylinder taller than the length of the curve on another, then centered the tube on the spline. I had made the cylinder with a bunch of sections (64, to be exact) so I selected all the points except for those of the very bottom and zoomed in really close on the center of the lowest selected ring of points. I rotated the whole selection so the center of that ring was on the spline. I then deselected the bottom ring of points and rotated again, approximating the curve and bending the tube one section at a time. When I was done I had a few sections left over (better than needing more) so I deleted them and named the rest. There is probably a better way to make a bent tube, but it worked for me and went quickly once I got into the hang of it. Oh, and originally I just moved the rings of points instead of rotating them. This worked fine for very slight curves, but once I got near the big bend it became obvious that it was going to look warped, as if I had taken a slinky and slid the top part sideways a bit. It might be cool for a slinky, but it isn't cool for a tube.
3. Texturing is a pain in the... There, I said it. It's really hard to tile a texture on an object without having it look like I just tiled a texture on an object like a jerk who's too lazy to draw a bigger image (or too cheap to pay for the high res version of somebody else's image.) Especially when the images have seams or copyright info in them. Great. My scene has your url in it. Thanks a lot, jerk. I was going to credit you, but now I'll just use a lightwave texture, instead.
4. Making the spotlight look like a spotlight. Sounds simple enough, right? Well what I meant (see number 1 above) was "making it look like the spotlight was a searchlight like the ones in the movies." You know, the ones whose light isn't quite constant throughout its radius? They have this weird effect where the light is really bright in the center, then fades outward, but gets super bright around the edge. I figured projecting a texture would get the job done, and lightwave DOES have a setting for this, but I couldn't draw one well enough and I couldn't find one online, so I just stuck with a regular light. It probably wouldn't have been visible though the blinds, anyway.
5. General frustration. It never occurred to me that making changes to an object's surface settings while in layout and saving the scene did not actually make any changes. The next time I load the scene, the surfaces are all back to the way they were. I guess "save scene" does not mean "save everything you've done to this scene." Yes, I know it's loading the object files anew each time I load the scene, but it still annoys me. I know I can switch to the modeller and change the settings, then sync the object with layout, but it's still annoying. It also seems that every time I have a project due my computer decides to remind me how dependent I am on its proper functioning. It happened a few times last semester during apcg 110, too. And the white stripes on the wall are from the intense light. It's at over 1000 percent. I wanted a really harsh light.
Things I would have done differently:
I would like to have added a mangled file cabinet with drawers out and papers strewn about, drawers for the desk, a few odds and ends (red stapler, paperclips, etc.), stuff to make it look more like an office. Maybe even a chair (GASP! An office with a chair?! Heresy!)
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| | | Time Frame | Desk | 4 hours | | | Lamp | 4 hours | | | Blinds | 5 hours | | | Walls | 30 minutes | | | Glass | 4 hours | | | Pencil | about 90 minutes | | | Window | 2 hours | | | time spent in layout | 15 hours | | | total time | 36 hours | | | It may not look like it, but I did a lot of work on this. |
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| | References
Our textbook, the class website (the one with the galleries of past semesters' work). I found other sites, but they didn't have anything to do with this project, so I'll use/cite them in later projects.
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