3710 Computer Graphics Project

I choose to model the Calgary Tower since I grew up near Clagary and I used Blender. I must admit I had a tough time getting the hang of Blender in the beginning. At first the visual controls seemed clunky and frustrating, but as I worked with it I stumbled upon hot keys and shortcuts to make viewing alot easier and more effective. As I completed the model I found myself using more hotkeys that made working with Blender alot smoother.

Below is a close up of a section that took me a considerable amount of time to get right. First it took me a long time to figure out how to make a cylinder curve in such a way, then more time to curve it in the way I wanted.

For the peak of the tower I modeled what I could see in pictures including the circular windows on the top on the tower. I wanted to have the clouds that I have as the background reflecting off the windows, but the method I was going to use to get this effect did not work for reasons unknown to me. However I got the effect to work in a different file and couldn't understand why it would not work in this file.

All in all I feel I learned quite a bit from tutorials online, but I learned more as I worked with the program, how to manipulate the camera just how I wanted it, having a render preview so I didn't have to stop and render the entire image, as well as the extrude tool which I used to make cruved surfaces. In the end I had fun using Blender and will probably work with it in the future.

Chris McDonald 2009