COMPUTER SCIENCE 3710
Computer Graphics
Model of “Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witness” Using Ray Tracing Software
Presented by: Sudipto (Raj) Chowdhury (ID: 001127441)
The ray tracing is a technique to generate a high quality image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects. For this project, I decided to model the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witness located in the West side of Lethbridge. The reason I chose this image is that this hall is architecturally standard, modest and suitable to model in the limited time period.
A Kingdom Hall is a place of worship used by Jehovah’s witnesses. The term was first suggested in 1935 by Joseph Franklin Rutherford. Witnesses prefer the term “Kingdom hall” over “Church”. Followings are the original pictures of the Kingdom Hall-
Figure 1: Front view of the original building
Figure 2: Left side view of the original building
Figure 3: Right side view of the original building
To implement the model, I had to gain basic knowledge about all the available ray tracing software tools i.e. PovRay, Blender, 3DStudioMax, Maya and SketchUp. Among these tools, I found Google SketchUp more user-friendly and easy to work with. I spent several hours to learn how to create models in Google SketchUp. The video tutorials available in http://sketchup.google.com/training/videos.html were very helpful.
Figure 4: Rendered image of the object with similar properties
The first step of implementing the model was to create the shape of the object and to do so I applied a simple Google SketchUp technique. I spent a plenty amount of time to construct the roof. The video tutorials did not include any house with three roof tops. Once I finished the roofing, the rest of the tasks were to add pillars, create windows, doors, and chimney, make parking lots, side-walk and finally paint the model with appropriate colours. I mostly used Push/Pull, Move, Rotate, Pan, Line and Rectangle tools to finish the constructions.
I had to come up with an idea to create the chimney and the pillars. Google SketchUp has a tape measure tool to measure distance that can be used to scale the object properly. Before I built the chimney, I measured the distance between the roof edge and the probable chimney location and using the pan tool I pointed the tape to the base of the building. A rectangle was drawn at the base with the same measurement and it was pulled until the preferred height. The pillars and boxes were created utilizing the same method.
Figure 5: Construction of the chimney
Google SketchUp has an online 3D warehouse to import trees, shrubs, stones, cars, people etc. I imported trees, shrubs and stones in my model to make it more realistic.
Figure 6: Right side view of the rendered image of the object
Creating the water pipelines was pretty straight forward . I used Circle tool to build the water lines.
Figure 7: Right side view of the rendered image
The roof drain pipe was created with a polygon that was pulled until the roof. Constructing the curved pipe was frustrating as there was no tool in Google SketchUp to bend a solid object, so I selected four vertices at the edge of the roof at 45° angle with top surface of the drainage pipe and drew the lines to colour each plane.
Figure 8: Left side view of the rendered image of the object
Figure 9: Rendered image of the object with parking lot
The main difficulty with this software is that it becomes too slow once the warehouse items are added to the model and sometimes the software crashes while auto-saving and editing the 3D image. Another problem with Google SketchUp is that it does not contain sufficient colours to paint wall, ground-cover and roof.
I would like to acknowledge the following online resources for the assistance-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Hall