CPSC 3710 - Computer Graphics Project

By: Blake Robinson

 

What I Created and How:

I decided to create one of the wind turbines from the Crowsnest Pass area. I used Blender to create my project. I decided to use Blender over POVRay because I liked the interface on it and found that tutorials were easy to find for Blender. They had some very helpful tutorials for using the program on the Blender website. To create the wind turbine I started with a cylinder for the pole and another cylinder rotated toward the camera for the motor casing. I saved that as a .blend file and opened a new file to create the bulb on the front. For the bulb I used a UV Sphere and cut off half of it so that I could place it on the front of the motor casing and saved this as another .blend file. I then created another file to create the blades by using cones and saved this as another .blend file. I then opened up the pole file and added the bulb and the blade and duplicated the blade twice and rotated the blades to fit in the right position. I made everything line up looking at it from all sides/front/back. I used a plane and changed the color to a sky blue for the sky placed behind the wind turbine. For the grass I used a plane and went to the particles menu and changed it from emitter to hair. I played around with the length and number or hairs to get what I thought looked good for grass and then I coloured it green.

 

Things Learned/Difficulties:

From the tutorials I learned many shortcuts for Blender and how to add objects from another .blend file to the main .blend file. There were a few things that I tried to do on my project that I was unable to figure out. I wanted to do for the sky a dome with an image of the sky embedded in it but when I tried to do it I couldn't figure it out so I just ended up using a plane and for the different angles I just ended up rotating the wind turbine and moving the camera. I also wanted to change the camera from landscape to portrait mode but was unable to find a better way than just rotating the camera which made the rendered photo sideways. For the blades on the wind turbine I originally tried to do them as curves that you can connect and then change into mesh but I could get it working right. I also had troubles with getting the formatting for the html to work right.

 

Thoughts:

I found that getting used to Blender was very difficult but it got a lot easier over time. I would have liked to have been able to do some things different but I was able to figure out how to do so. Overall this project was not too bad but I still probably spent 15 - 20 hours on it with learning the program and getting everything to look good.

 

Real image on left. Rendered image on right.

If you click on the real images you will be directed to where I found the image

 

Rendered Version from a couple other angles: