3710 Project Andrew Laqua

For my project I decided to do Markin Hall, the back patio side, using blender. I thought that the buildings simple shapes and modern style would make it a great choice for this project.

I started with a plane to be the patio ground. I played around trying to give it a rough texture but decided to settle with a colour that matches fairly close. This is when I first had troubles with light and shading.

When I took the picture it was rather dark and clouded out so I hoped that instead of using a light source I could just fake the effects with my choosen colours.

I tried setting the material to shadeless which seemed to ruin the colours. I ended up setting light source as the sun which showed my colours properly and also managed to keep the shadows to a minimal.

The blocks of the building, which consist of windows all along the main wall was my biggest texturing hurdle. With the help of a mix of video and text tutorials I managed to set the texture of the main blocks to resemble a reflective window, with the modification of alpha levels and surprisingly the newer blender versions make glass and mirrors very simple.

The tedious part was adding the window ledges. Starting with one cube stretched to size and coloured I duplicated that one for all the others. The door is made up of thicker cubes to set it apart, though the handles are barely visible in the picture I ommited them from the image.

I feared that the garbage cans would be the hardest part as I wasn't sure how I would be allowed to mold objects or if I would have to build them from scratch somehow. Luckily blenders object editting tools made that very simple and I nearly figured it out myself.

The truely hard part was trying to form a sun for the sign on the wall. I tinkered making it from scratch using curve tools provided, then tried drawing it by hand with the pencil. Neither were even near successful so I ended up faking one through the molding of a sphere. Molding edge by edge gave much control but I gave up on making it perfect, settling for the resemblance of a sun I have.

Overall I think my picture was a bit too simple to be really challenging, but it still took a good amount of time just learning and getting a feel for blender. My experience with blender was actually very plesant with all the tutorials availiable. I hope to make regular use of blender after this as it was quite enjoyable.

All tutorials were found on either Youtube, blender.org, or the blender wiki.