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2005 Spring ->3D Computer Modeling ->Galleries ->The Mills
| | | Kenny DiGiordano | | Group Scene | | Chris Burlison | | | | Michael Crabtree | | | | Jon Spayer | | | | | Hunting by Moonlight | |
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| | Inspiration
Jon:
With spring in the air I have visions of tulips and windmills in my mind. Coupled with Chris’ recent photo project on local windmills along with Ken’s gargoyle and Van Helsing motion picture still, we developed our concept of an old world scene.
Chris:
After Jon mentioned an idea of creating a windmill, I was excited because I had already photographed a friend’s windmill. Being able to link a photo project from last semester to this group project was cool for me.
Kenny:
Once Chris and Jon had mentioned the idea of creating a windmill, the first thing that came to my mind was the scene in Van Helsing when Frankenstein ran to the windmill. A mob of people came to the windmill to attack and kill Frankenstein. It was a very old and weathered windmill with an overall very dark feel to it. I figured that we could use a similar story by having a mob of people coming to kill a Gargoyle that has been destroying their crops and killing their animals for food. The attack takes place near the village by the Windmill.
Mike:
When Chris and Jon came up with the idea of the windmills, I thought of putting an old world windmill on a grassy plain. I thought the windmill would look really cool if we could model it to look like it was falling apart, and darken the scene to create a sort of haunted look to it. The scene took some twists and turns, but the end result turned out great.
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| | | Objects | Landscape | Mike | 2 hours | | | Mountains | Mike | 2 hours | | | Windmill | Chris, Kenny, and Jon | 4-5 hours | | | Gargoyle | Kenny | 2 weeks, previously created | | | Character Stand-ins | Lightwave 7 Character animation, Timothy Albee | | | | Water | Jon | 1 day | | | Torch with flame | Chris | 2 hours | | | Grass (saslite) | Kenny, Chris, and Mike | Gradual work for 1 month) | | | Pitchfork | Chris | 30 min | | | Sky (Skytracer) | Kenny, Mike, John, and Chris | Trial and error for a week | | | | | | | Texture Images | www.gallerie1.de/ Weathered_Wood_3-1024.JPG | | | www.co.vermilion.il.us/ Wilderness/gravel.jpg | | | highpoly3d.com/textures/ grass/grass_2.jpg | | | www.johnsolo.net/ tex/wood_shingle.jpg |
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| | Problems and Solutions
Jon:
God spent a day on the oceans. I spent at least 20 hours on this one. The project is in constant revision in my mind night and day until now.
Tutorials are a good utility and an asset. They are quite helpful so far as having common steps to creating water. Once these you get the hang of it, it’s easy to adjust the variables.
Various bump maps such as ripples, crumples, and turbulence are layered to simulate water texture on an object. Of course diffusion and transparency are primary factors as well. Tweaking these provide different outcomes also.
Spending time experimenting with volumetric lighting and fog among other effects provides alternate renders. I remembered the torch bearers along the way. We used the fire tutorial to incorporate desired elements.
All of my experimentation ran well. All except for my last attempt where the water in the scene would only render white.
The sharp line at waters edge of the beach in the scene could be softened. An original idea includes importing to Adobe Photoshop and using the stamp tool along the effected area. Dr. Steinback suggests trying the water damage tutorial.
Kenny:
Saslite
Problem: No matter what I did I was unable to get it to render right. It always came out too bright.
Solution: NONE, I tried many things, turning off lights, turning down the diffuse, using really dark colors, and still nothing. It would render right at home but when I brought it to school it made it bright again. (????????)
Sky Tracer
Problem 1: It was first hard to get the light in the right position that we wanted.
Solution 1: Finally we got it right by selecting that light in layout and through adjusting the position of the light you can watch it move into the right place.
Problem 2: It was difficult to get the sky to be dark and get a moon behind the clouds.
Solution 2: Through playing with the atmosphere settings, it made it dark and then I was able to adjust the color on the moon.
Chris:
Problem: After applying the sas lite to the grass in the foreground we thought it needed a smoother transition from the beach to the grass because they are such different colors.
Solution: The first thing we had to do is use subpatching to create a more organic layer so we could apply thinner more transparent sas lite over the back of the beach. This process took some time to get it precise where the square looking polys look smoother.
Problem: While going through the fire tutorial I had some difficulty coming up with the same result as the photo provided.
Solution: After going through the tutorial once again paying close attention to the step-by-step directions I was able to get a nicer looking result.
Mike:
Problem: I couldn’t get the mountains to come out right. I wanted to create them by just using a procedural texture on a flat area, but the mountains never came out tall enough. Then, when I manually deformed the land to make the mountains, they looked way too fake.
Solution: I put the procedural texture on a very small version of the mountains so the procedural texture came out more pronounced. Then we resized the mountains to fit the scene.
Problem: When assigning different names to the ground, they had huge jagged looks to it because the polygons weren’t in a straight line for the direction of the beach or the path.
Solution: I deformed the polygons in modeler to give the illusion of straight lines. | |
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| | Time Frame
See object table above.
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| | References
Simple Texture Mapping tutorial from class website
http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~ranger/samples/CSCI140/
tutorialsF04/Bohlin_tutorial/Tutorial.htm
Volumetric Lighting Tutorial from Lightwave Website
http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/
tutorials/specialfx/volumetric_fire/volumetric_fire.html
http://www.renderaid.com
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![](javascript:launchRemote("../../../../album/2005S/group_scenes/TheMills1.jpg"))
![](javascript:launchRemote("../../../../album/2005S/group_scenes/TheMills2.jpg"))
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