Megan Bednarz

Two lines of code and 6 frames produced this…

For some reason, the center hex bolts are rotating the wrong way… I may have to boolean those gears and then turn them. I used booleans and polygons for this. Not exactly good modeling practice, but for gears… it gets the job done. They’re full of planar faces, so it shouldn’t matter TOO much how many sides each of those faces have. FYI I have divided them up pretty well at least.

My concept for this project is to do a bunch of gears, different types of gears, all connected, and have a band going around them which has the gear notches also. The band is going to be the major programming feat, so I will work on it next, then worry about other gears. I’m probably going to have it divided into segments that march along (like a real marching band!) based on proximity to another object and then turn… for instance, when they come tangent to a gear, they should stay tangent to a gear and go around. We’ll see how I can tackle the daunting task of programming that…using expressions!

Well, after struggling with some strange transparency issues, I finally managed to get this right. I followed the tutorial Adan used for his screwdriver to make the lighting work here. It’s supposed to be sitting on a sheet of textured paper.  The background is a blurred image supposed to represent a room. I did depth of field to make it sit back in the frame a bit better. I wasn’t able to do any caustic effects because of the timeframe, but I think it looks pretty real as it is!

Nurbs can’t stop me!! I eventually just grouped a bunch of objects for that tip part. Now… I have to figure out materials and lighting. Argh! But at least I can be assured my pen is mathematically accurate to a tolerance of .02 cm…at least for most of it! I had to eyeball some of it. But finally… it’s done!

It’s shaping up. I was having trouble earlier trying to get the surfaces I had for the clip part to actually trim… I realized it was because I didn’t have the trim edge going all the way around. Bah.

I created the base of this with the Loft tool going through some circles… so I could use the circles again for the interior of the cap. This cap is made of 6 objects that I plan to group, since I need to keep the hard edges.

I was going to work on this Friday, but regrettably I got sick. Thankfully I am feeling better today, but I definitely need my rest if I am to recover. And so the pen remains… unfinished

Apparently I will never work at Dreamworks because I hate NURBS. They may be mathematically accurate, but they’re a pain in the behind!

However, I have decided to use NURBS for this project because they are accurate and because they seem to be the optimal solution for modeling the pen.

The bic pen! Cheap, but trusty. Found this image from this very interesting blog post. I hope to focus mainly on the lighting. Since it is a transparent object, it should be very cool-looking if I get it right!

I tried several different color schemes, and I think this one worked out the best. These were the colors I had always thought of her as, though the feathers were different in my mind. I chose a background color that would bring out the colors in the wings.
Anyway, the texture is below, in case anyone was confused on how the pieces fit together. The white parts are transparent in the PNG. If I were to improve this UV map, I would refine the feet and add claws (which would probably be blue) and fix the ears where it’s not quite transparent.

Final poly count is the same as below.

SO MANY UVs. SO LITTLE TIME… This is the result of about 7 hours worth of work. The other 2 hours I spent today were cleaning up the model.

Here’s the UV map itself…Now time to texture!! Also, for all you people out there who feel like it, you can texture this model! Just use this image (scale it to 1024px square if you wish) and send me your results. I’d love to see it! For all the people in class… well you have your own model to texture.

I have triangulated most of the nonplanar faces, in hopes that it will render better… or whatever. I still have yet to smooth the edges. I plan to do that before the final time has come.

Rounded out his beak, shifted his weight slightly. This was made with three passes; using Maya software: a beauty pass, and a shadow pass, and using Mental Ray: an occlusion pass. See below for the final geometry mesh thingy. Hmmm… on the render… not sure about the white background, but that’s what Dave said to use, so I’m sticking to it.