CPSC 3710 Ray Tracing Project
Andrew Campbell
The sculpture I chose to model was the artistic pyramid shape outside the PE building. I used blender to create the images. The image is composed mostly of cubes, whose vertices have been modified to fir the composition. The textures were made using the colour tool in blender, except for the grass, which was taken from an image on the internet.
Composition:
The Compostition is made in tatality of "cube: meshes, with each vertex manually manipulated to fit the sculpture. This method was chosen because of the nature of the sculpture. The sculture is composed of thick sheet metal, cut and welded together make the pyramid shape. The best method for duplicating this is to take a cube and scale it down on the z axis until it resembles a sheet of metal. Then I translate each vertex individually to give the new shape the impression of cut sheet metal.
The first step was creating the concrete base. This was accomplished in a similar method to the sheets of metal, but with the addition of another segment as the base was a pentagonal prism. This was accomplised by extruding one face of the cube, and then turning the corners in to properly mimic the shape of the base. Afterwards, I created the metal base. Origionally, I duplicated the base and recoloured it, but soon realized that it would not take the right shape. Instead, I created one sheet of metal, expanded one side and scaled down the top to recreate the cut-off pyramid shape of the base. Then, I move to the triangular pillars. To create these, I extruded one side of the base, and then extruded the tops of those, in order to have the pillars flush with the base. I then duplicated and rotated the sides to make the other sides of the pillars.
The rest of the structure was created merely by creating and properly cropping sheets of metal. The ground surrounding the structure is a plane, which was subdivided into several portions. Then, each portion was translated vertically to create an uneven ground.
Difficulties:
The major difficulty I had in creating the project was that of colouring. I found creating colour and textures to properly mimic those on the real world sculpture to be unintuitive and frustrating. As was expected, the blender interface was diffucult to use. However, a slew of helpful guides on the internet assisted me, and this was relegated to a minor issue.
Blender
Landscaping tutorial where I got the texture for the grass.
