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2007 Spring ->3D Computer Modeling ->Galleries ->Final Gallery ->Christopher Funk
| | | Christopher Funk | | Final Scene | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Night's Guardian | |
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| | Inspiration
With day’s retreat, night’s arrival marks the awakening of the night's guardian. Perhaps, just perhaps, the moss coverings are only a ruse, and its aware of presence. Sitting. Watching. Waiting.
The inspiration for this project was brought about from a combination of wanting to use a gargoyle in a creative project, as well as my own love of gargoyles - specifically, the ones that are little figurines and have no practical application.
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| | | Objects | Gargoyle | Chris Funk | | | Terrain | Chris Funk | | | Tree | Chris Funk (Using Bryces tree editor.) |
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| | | Textures | All textures: | Chris Funk (Using Bryces texture editor.) | | | Background Scene: | Chris Funk (Created using Bryces sky lab.) |
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| | Problems and Solutions
Problem 1: Showing the detail in a backlit object.
Part of my initial idea was to have the gargoyle practically silhouetted by the moon; however, I knew that getting the detail of the gargoyle to show would be difficult. Thus, I started my project off by doing lighting tests. Using a standard three point lighting setup worked reasonably well, and I eventually carried on. Through the course of the project, however, the idea evolved and I chose to render in Bryce, as opposed to Lightwave, and the scene itself changed to fit the character a little better. Thus, to finally solve the problem, I rotated the gargoyle so that more of his front could catch the light, and then still added a couple small point lights to emphasize the face and detail on the gargoyle’s ‘lit’ side.
Problem 2: Blocking out an organic figure.
Simply getting the gargoyle blocked out was difficult for me, even with referencing the textbook cited at the bottom of this report. Thus, I owe a huge thanks to Winston Thrasher who was willing to help me out until I got my model roughly shaped.
Problem 3: Shaping an organic figure.
Apparently, there’s a reason that we’re supposed to avoid organic modeling, characters especially. Until one is adept enough at creating figures, the amount of time put into them doesn’t seem equal to the awe factor of them in a scene. To solve the problem of shaping my gargoyle, I started off by heavily referencing the textbook. Once I got far enough along, I diverged from that and shaped it a bit further. In the end, to get a better facial expression, I ignored the geometry and shaped the face while it was subpatched. While this helped, the figure still didn’t turn out as initially conceptualized.
Problem 4: Getting a nice looking scene to put my gargoyle in.
Since my gargoyle didn’t turn out as he was supposed to in the concept, I felt that he didn’t quite fit in well with the scene that was initially conceptualized. While I’d planned from the beginning to use Bryce to create the background image, I found that importing my gargoyle into Bryce and working the rest of it from within there was ideal for both saving time and producing a reasonably nice scene and render.
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| | | Time Frame | Planning/Researching: | 5 hours | | | Lighting in Lightwave: | 6 hours (Unused beyond proof-of-concept) | | | Modeling Gargoyle: | 18 hours | | | Creating Sky/Background: | 3 hours | | | Modeling Terrain: | 5 minutes | | | Modeling Tree: | 1 hour | | | Texturing Gargoyle: | 1 hour | | | Lighting in Bryce: | 1.5 hours | | | Post-Production Touchup: | 1.5 hours | | | Other(Layout/Render Tests/etc): | 3 hours |
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| | References
Colleague: Winston Thrasher
Professor: Frank Pereira
Textbook: Brilliant, Building a Digital Human (ISBN: 1584502851)
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