DEREK'S PROJECT, CS3710

What I've attempted to do in my project is to create the old water tower which looms by the train bridge on the west side of Old man River. As I created the picture I ran into quite a few obstacles in the modeling process and especially in the material mapping and editing. I decided to use 3D Studio Max to do my designing even though I heard that it would be hard to learn. The majority of the time on this project was actually spent on the going through various tutorials to understand how to do modeling and material editing and mapping.

First I set out on my journey to get some pictures of the tower. I went to the old mine site and asked the kind people there if I could take some pictures of the site for a school project. They were ok with that and when I returned they asked me what sort of project I was doing. I told them I hoped to do a 3D model of the site and they were excited to help me out on this.

I then went through several tutorials to learn the software that I was going to be using. I tried to keep the modeling fairly straight forward. But I did do more detailing with the house at the bottom, I was able to experiment with some boolean union operations to make the windows and the door frames. I used a similar method for the doors themselves. There are some very good tools in 3DS that I learned about to help with the top of the tower.

Some of the materials I found were already built in to 3DS. I did create a material and used it for the four Tower pillars. I spent the most time creating this material. I used the following picture for the main material. and edited it so that it repeated really nicely. The only major problem that I have with the material is that it repeats on the whole object, when it should stop at the bottom (where the house begins, and should also stop up high (where the cylinder begins).

I also created a material for the center pole that runs up the middle of the tower. However that one is less detailed and so it is hard to see in this scale.

The lighting was also difficult for me as I tried different kinds of lighting, for example spot lights and omni lights. The only lighting that did what I was looking for was the 'daylight system' in 3DS max.