CPSC3710 Project

Project Planning

For the planning of this project the first thing that I needed to take into consideration was what I wanted to model. I selected the new Calgary City Hall. The reasons for choosing this building was because I thought the shape would not be overly complicated to model, it had not been done a lot in previous years, and the possibility for really neat reflections. After making the choice I selected this reference photo:

Calgary City Hall Render of City Hall

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Next I had to select the tool I was going to use in order to create my image. I selected Maya because I had access to this program as well as knew someone with considerable experience with it. I also chose Maya over POVray because I was able to visually see the design before rendering.

Difficulties

The building was fairly simple to model. Most of the windows are the same size I was able to copy and paste large sections of them. The angled windows on the side of the building and the slanted window walls were a little more difficult to model. Texturing turned out to be harder than it should have been. I was not grouping the polygons for the windows as I was modeling, and because of this I had to select all the windows one at a time after I had the building completed. The next difficulty I had was getting the window reflections to work. The reflection is from an image placed beside the building, but because of the camera angle and the different angles of the windows it had to be transformed to so that it would reflect in all of the windows.

Conclusion

This project was a lot of fun to work on. I found I enjoy 3d modeling a lot more than I originally thought I would. As I do not have a lot of artistic talent I still struggled with it but over all I think my image turned out quite well.