About This Project

To help celebrate Alberta's 100th anniversary, we were asked to ray trace an image of some local Southern Alberta landmark.

This project can be done using POVRay or any other ray tracing software such as Blender3D, 3DStudioMax, Maya, ect.

Here are some examples of what the rendered final product looked like in Blender3D, I made no attempt to hide the various objects inorder to give some kind of perspective of how to fit all of the object together to make the picture as realistic as I could. Each image is a link, feel free to look.

Featured websites

POVRay

Blender3D

Lets begin

As I was new to Blender I immediately went online to find some of the many tutorials on shape building and texturing; in the process of this, I found a picture of a train and decided on that as my project.

The train body was made of a tube, which I extruded outward to the length I felt was necessary, I subdivided the tube so that I could tapper it larger as it goes from front to back, then I insterted a UVSphere in the front and put a cylinder in the end for the head light; which is another UVShpere that was given a light texture.

The other structures sticking out of the body follow the same principle, the stack is a cone inserted into the body with a tube ontop to give it that tapered look out of the body, the other three round structures from the body are done the same way but with a cylinder and a UVSphere on the top. The other headlight is done the same way as the first head light except it is mounted on the top of the tube. All parts of the train were give a faded black apperance with a blend texture.

The bell apparatus is just a cylinder into the body with a plane for the bell mount on top, and the bell its self is a cube subdivided many times and shrunk at the top and flared out at the bottom, then colored gold using the materials button.

The wheels of the train are just circles which I extruded inward and outward to give the wheels some depth then I coloured them a light silver. The spokes are cylinders that I shrunk down to the right size then copied using the shift-D command and rotated them to the proper position and continued this till I had enough spokes to fill a wheel, I then just copied this one wheel for all the others. The arms that drive the wheels where done using cubes, which I elongated and flared the ends and put a cylinder in the middle of the joining points so it would look like there was a pin in the center for articulation of the arms. The drive for the arms is just a cube that intersects the base of the front wheels and has two cylinders inserted through the drive to look like tanks.

The front wheel base is done using two cubes, one that is inserted into the body of the trian, the top is shrunken and the bottom is not; to give it a tapered look from the base where the axles are located for the front wheels, which is just a cube. The axles for the front wheels are just cylinders that go through the base and intersect the spokes on the wheels which I described earlier, all the wheels were done the same way with regards to the axles. The rear wheels just axles just go through a cube which was reshaped and tappered in on both ends.

The house for the train is made up of 3 planes for the walls, the front wall plane was subdivided many times and given an arched top, while the 4th plane is for the roof which was subdivided many times and reshaped to match to arch of the front wall as well as flared up on the back of the roof. The window for the train is just a coloured plane with red coloured cylinders to make up the frame for the window.

The car for the train is basically made up of all cubes some of which were subdivided and reshaped and some that are just cubes. The rock that is in the car is just a plane that was subdivided many times, reshaped and given a rock texture using an image I found on the internet of gravel. The text is set on the out side of the wall and train.

The train tracks were made up from a cube which I subdivided many times and selected the middle points which I resized inward, then I gave the top of the track a slight rounded look. The ties are made up of cubes and given a wood texure and colour. The track bed is a cube which I resized large at the bottom and smaller at the top, then I used the gravel image to texture the gravel bed for the tracks.

The water is a plane that was sloped down a bit so that the camera could pick it up and given a distored noise texture, I played with the colours till I got a combination that I liked. I also had to play with different lighting combinations to get the light reflecting off the water like I wanted. The reflextion of the train in the water was done with PhotoShop 7.0, I cut the front side of the train out, then flipped it vertically, distorted it using glass distortion and gave it a shear distortion to make it lean backwards. Then I added a drop shadow to the reflection so it looks like the train is also casting a shadow on the water.

The wheat field is just a plane that was subdivided many times and reshaped to both lean backwards and taper inward in the middle. Then the plane was given an image of wheat as a texture which was resized using the x and y repeat buttons to make the wheat look kind of to scale.

The sky is simply a plane given an image of some clouds I found on the internet, I first opened the clouds in PhotoShop 7.0 and gave then a slight gaussian blur, so that they would look like they were in the distance.

The smoke was taken from an industrial polution web site and doctored up using PhotoShop 7.0 to fit the size of the train.

Final Product

Comment

The hardest part of this project was definatley learning how to use Blender3D. It could not have been done without the many online tutorials and many many hours of just playing with the software, but it was also one of the most enjoyable project thus far of Com Sci.

Clayton Bohmer