Midterm: Documentation

Abstract: My project was the modeling and rendering of a character and several other objects to be animated later for the final.

Production Log:

The main character is constructed from the primitive objects which were then manipulated into more complex shapes.  The skin and clothes (hat, sleeves, pants, and gloves) have a lambert texture on them.  To achieve the appearance of a shirt, tie, and buttons, I created an image in Photoshop, and mapped the image to the character's torso.  The monocle and shoes have phong texture, and the shoes and eyes have a blinn texture.  The eyes use a color gradient to achieve the appearance of pupils and irises.

I found that modeling the joints of the arms was particularly difficult.  Towards the end I realized that you can get a much smoother, neater joint by just putting a sphere in the middle of it and scaling it to the correct size.  Figuring out how to model the joints well will be important to do, since the character eventually will be animated, walking up stairs onto a stage, then playing the guitar and smashing it on the stage.

The amp and guitar were modeled similarly to the character, starting with primitive shapes.  The neck of the guitar has a lambert surface with a wood texture on it.  The body is a blinn surface.  The floor is a lambert wood surface and the wall is a plain lambert surface.  I added a spotlight with shadows to shine on the guitar and amp.  The amp has a 2d leather surface.

Self Evaluation:

Everything worked out fairly well for this stage of the project.  I was pretty happy the way the textures and surfaces came out, especially with the mapped image of the tux and the color gradients for the pupils of the eyes.  However, I may have to re-model the arms and legs to be animated more easily.  I would also like to add more detail to the hands, rather than just having spheres.  In the future, I will animate this as described earlier in the blog, and this will be done for the final poject.