Ethan Kim's CS3710 Computer Graphics Project ( February 12, 2004 )

Model #1. Alberta Legislature Building in Edmonton, AB
Click on the images to view hi-res.

I used the above picture to model the scenery, as well as many other pictures available on the web. The main output is this:

Another one from a different angle:

And another scene modeling the night shot:

Model #2. Lethbridge Teapot

l       More intermediate images and source files can be found here.


In order to create the first model, Alberta Legislature Building, I had to go through quite a few obstacles in terms of Povray syntax:

1. First off, like OpenGL, translating+scaling+rotating is "order-sensitive". Once you scale an object by k, the scaled object follows a coordinate system whose size is k times the original system. Therefore you need to be careful in which order you do these operations.

2. Texturing is only done once, and if an object is CSG(compound objects, that is), then you either need to set the texture as a whole, or each components differently.  This changed my model's rendering time significantly, and since I was declaring textures for each different components in the scene, I had to go and turn off the textures and pigments for each one of them, so that I can test the file without having wait for 20 mins to render.

3. Trees: although the trees are not the main part of the scene, it was required, as there is a "park" around the building area.  I first tried to create my own trees, but it required too much of brain work to recursively grow the branches and leaves in arbitrary directions.  Hence, after surfing the web for 2 hours, I found a good modeling macros, created by Gilles Tran ( http://www.oyonale.com/ressources/english/sources01.htm ).  This model was also used by our funky grad student, Elspeth, in the previous school year.  These macros are used with minor modifications in terms of settings, and are called from a separate include file within my src?folder.

4. Water fountain:  This is the water tank located right in front of the Legislature building.  In order to make the texture more water-ish, I used the stock texture called "Water", and gave it a few modifications in terms of transparency, reflection, ripples, etc.  The water itself is simply a box object, which I've made it hollow, so that it turns out to be transparent, as well as reflecting.

5. The windows:  Windows are, in essence, a union of the frames and glass object mounted.  The glass objects are created in much the same way as the water, and this can be achieved by creating two very similar sized objects, one representing the outer surface of glass, the other representing the inner surface.

6. The sky: In order to make the sky and clouds more realistic, I created the sky as a hollow plane with octave, omega, lambda values specified.?The fog effect was also used to white-out the horizon.?When one is creating the sky using this method, one must make sure the light object and/or the camera is located below the surface of the sky, otherwise... you're out of the earth!

7. Building: the building and stairs are created using boxes, cylinders, spheres, and prisms.  The prism was used to create the gate's triangular roof as well as the hexagonal pipe that connects the building and the spherical roof.?Textures were done using stock textures, except the sky where color map was used to create a more natural sky.

8. For night scene: The night scene was done using the same objects within the scenery, but with different light sources to show a little more 'nighty'. Notice the reflections on the water tank itself, which was caused by the lights coming from the windows and lamps.  I tried to set the lamps outside the door the only light sources available, but since the building itself had created too many shadows around the edges, it just looked too spooky.

 9. The teapot:? The shape of the teapot was created using Bezier curves by lathe command in povray. The image map to create the leaf-shaped pattern was imported from GIF files.?The “the metallic rings?around the vase was done by creating another teapot shaped object, covered with the metallic surface, "Differenced?it with few boxes that goes through the vase, and then merged together with the original vase.?Unfortunately, I was not able to do a tremendous job in modeling this object, primarily due to the time constraints.

Summing up, these pictures were completely done from scratch with Povray(except the trees, of course).  I used a ported version of Povray, on FreeBSD 4.9 stable release, which I ran connected via ssh.  There were a few compatibility issues with Povray3.5, but since the one installed in our Sub labs is version 3.1, so it should render fine.