Ranger 2006 Spring - Alpha Team Go!! - 2006 Spring - 3D Computer Modeling - Galleries - Group Gallery

3D Computer Modeling
APCG 330 Spring 2006

Alpha Team Go!!

2006 Spring ->3D Computer Modeling ->Galleries ->Group Gallery ->Alpha Team Go!!

Brady Kennedy		Group Scene
Ryan Crangle
Chris Colton
Jeremiah Jones
	Intergalactic Warfare of Destruction


	Inspiration We wanted to create a scene that utilized our full imagination. We chose an outer space scene. We felt that creating a Martian landscape and various space ships would allow us to create anything that our imagination allowed us. The space ships are inspired by various films such as Star Wars, Starship Troopers, and various cartoons. The various space ships engage in an epic battle in the skies, with the view of the Martian landscape below. We felt that these two elements combined would add interest and contrast between the two areas of focus. Brady’s Inspiration: I wanted my terrain have really severe drop-offs and dramatic cliffs. I drew inspiration from the Grand Canyon as well as various internet images of terrains on Mars. I wanted the color palette to be more orange and red, to resemble Mars, but it came out looking too cartoon-like. I decided my terrain should have more realistic textures and colors, that were brown based, so that it resembled more earth-like terrains. Jeremiah's Inspiration: When thinking of ideas for my space ship I thought about what the space equivalent of an aircraft carrier would be. I thought since the ship can move in any direction, and air resistance is not an issue, a spherical design would be best. It has a lot of volume for holding ships, and it can let those ships out in a hurry. I made the ship in separate sections so it could house large ships along with hordes of small fighters. Ryan’s Inspiration: My inspiration for my two ships came from a variety of different places. The majority of my thought came from my own brain and thinking during the creating process, kind of a pay-as-you-go process. The other part came from just looking around the internet at different forms of space ships and fighter planes. I tried not to think about movies or such things too much, but the inspiration for the laser shooters I have to admit came from the X-Wing fighters from "Star Wars".

Objects	Fighter ships	Ryan Crangle
	Spherical Mother Ship	Jeremiah Jones
	Laser Beams in day scene	Brady Kennedy
	Martian Landscape	Brady Kennedy
	Enemy Mother Ship	Chris Colton
	Explosion	Christopher Colton
	Laser Beams in night scene	Christopher Colton

Textures	Egg Fighter texture	Ryan Crangle
	Egg fighter body-	shiphull.jpg
	Spherical "Mother Ship texture	Jeremiah Jones
	Ground texture	Brady Kennedy
	Foreground Hill Texture	Brady Kennedy
	Back hill Texture	Brady Kennedy
	Star fields - Christopher Colton	http://astronomy.swin.edu.au /~pbourke/texture
	Planet Background- www.pparc.ac.uk	http://astronomy.swin.edu.au /~pbourke/texture
	All other textures	Lightwave


	Problems and Solutions Group: We had problems getting everyone together, due to conflicting schedules. We had problems utilizing the limited amount of time in labs to get our project together. Also, there were problems with coordinating ideas between our group members. Also, finding a group name was a struggle for us. Ryan: My biggest problem would have to be getting everything the way I wanted it. As with other models, I usually make things as they go, and when you change one thing, it could possible change another object or placement of something else I was working on. There really is no solution for this except to just plug along and get the work done. Brady: For the terrain I had lots of trouble getting the color right. I had the ground and the hills as separate surfaces, but the colors still had to be analogous for the scene to look realistic. Also, I had some trouble working with the bump maps. I found that the hills in the back had too much definition, so far as texture goes, and depth of field or a sense of distance wasn't believable. I fixed that by selected the hills in the back, making them their own surface separate from the others, and I simply turned down the intensity on the bump maps. I spent way too much time selecting deselecting polygons for separate textures. I do not know a way to make that process quicker. For rendering the day scene I had trouble with the lights. I had two spotlights on one side turned down to negative light intensity for creating shadows. Chris: Creating the lighting was quite different from my desk scene; rather than having physical objects to place light sources inside, I had to look at the scene and determine where to place lights in order to create realistic looking shadows, and to highlight a majority of the objects. Once I learned that I could set a negative intensity to the lights in order to cast shadows, though, the lighting was greatly improved. Jeremiah: Cutting the sphere: At first, my ship was a giant sphere. I knew I wanted to cut it, but I wasn't sure how. I thought "hey, cut... knife... knife tool!" I sliced the sphere and tried to drag one piece away. The polygons were still connected. I realized that I would have to do some tricks to get this method to work right. Then I thought "hey, the sections I want are all the same shape. The sphere is centered on the origin, why don't I do a Boolean intersection?" So I did. I created a huge cube on a different layer and moved it so one corner was on the origin. I used Boolean intersect to get one eighth of the sphere, then copied it to a different layer. I then moved the section a bit along one axis and used the mirror tool to make a copy. I moved the copies and mirrored them again, netting 4 sections. Doing it again yielded the 8 I wanted. Spherical textures: When I had my ship ready for texturing, I knew I wanted it to look like it had a bunch of windows. I made an image with a bunch of white squares on a black background and applied it to my ship. EWW! Planar texturing is not the way to go. I then thought "sphere... spherical mapping... hmmm...." and tried it. It worked great, but the windows were too big. No one has windows that big. I changed the wrapping settings and made it look good. A week later someone noticed that the texture looked funky. Somehow it changed during that week. Now suddenly a wrap value of 4 wasn't good enough for it. I changed both horizontal and vertical values to 2. Now it looks fine. Streaking: Not THAT kind of streaking, I mean texture streaking. The outer hull of my ship used to have just one surface. The problem with that is it has a small lip that shouldn't be textured as part of the rest of the hull. I know it should be because when it WAS it had a whole bunch of streaks of white and black in weird patterns. Luckily there were only a few polygons responsible, so I selected them and gave them a surface they

Time Frame	Brainstorming/Planning	2 hrs.
	Enemy Mother Ship	2hrs.
	Fighter Ships	10 hrs.
	Spherical Mother Ship	13.5 hrs.
	Texturing Spherical Mother ship	13.5 hrs.
	Terrain Modeling	2 hrs.
	Terrain Texturing	8 hours
	Explosion	20 minutes
	Laser Beams in night scene	10 minutes
	Laser Beams in Day scene	20 minutes
	Layout for night scene	6 hours- Chris Colton
	Layout for day scene	6 hours- Brady Kennedy


	References Lasers/Explosions- http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~ranger/samples/CSCI140/ tutorialsS05/FireTutorial.pdf Starfields- http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/tuts_arts/ making_a_star_field.html Terrain Textures- http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/surface/ texturing/texturing_landscape_2.html Weight Maps- http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/ surface/quick_terrain/page6.html Fighter Ship Spline Modeling- Michael Steiner: (http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~ranger/samples/APCG330/tutorials/ Michael_Steiner_Spline_Modeling.pdf)

2006 Spring

Concept Design and Storyboarding

Applied Computer Graphics Program
Department of Computer Science
California State University, Chico
Chico, CA 95929-0410
530.898.5418
ranger@ecst.csuchico.edu

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