Welcome to Bushman Studios

CPSC611

Assignment 3
VR Tour - Frankenstein's Castle
Group Members
Edgar Rodriguez
Steve Bushman

For this project we had to design an implement a virtual structure based on the viewer we completed for the previous assignment. We had to create an interesting building (house, cathedral, office building, academic structure) or an art gallery (including interesting pieces, such as paintings and/or sculpture) that allows the user to explore various rooms.

We chose to do a Frankenstein's Mansion.

FOB - Edgar's Comments

I found working with the Flock of Birds to be somewhat frustrating. The interfacing step was the easy part; however, mapping the data was not as trivial as I had anticipated. In the beginning I had no test data to validate my conversion of bits to shorts. This made debugging burdensome since it was hard to tell which portion of the program was flawed. I could not tell if my mappings were wrong or my data was parsed incorrectly.

After confirming my data was right. I was still having problems mapping the matrix data. I decided to work with angle data instead. While working with the angle data I noticed that the roll was not functioning properly. After reading the FOB manual I realized that I was suppose to use a different scale when converting the data followed by converting the result to radians. In the end I managed to get the pitch, yaw, and roll to function properly with the angle data.

Once I had the Flocks of Birds fully functional I went back to see if I could get the matrix data to work. After much effort I had not success so I reverted to using the angle data.

Optimization

In order to have better control and more efficient run time we decided to bake the lights into the textures using Maya. We ran into several problems while trying to bake the textures. One of the main things is that you have to make sure that the normals are facing the correct way, otherwise, the texture will end up solid black.

Here is the process that we used to bake the textures in Maya:

Set up the all the lights in Maya and do some test renders to make sure that everything looks correct
Select the objects that you want to bake the lights on
Go to Lighting/Shading->Batch Bake (mental ray) option box
Select the camera you are viewing from
Select the Use Bake Set Override
Color Mode: Light and Color
Normal Direction: Surface Front
X and Y Resolution: 512
Convert and Close
Go to Hypershade
Go through the newly created surface shaders and do the following
Select Objects with Material
Shift select the surface shader
Go to Edit/Convert to File Texture (This creates a new shader)
Change the new shader to type lambert and reconnect the texture file to the shader color

Once I had the Flocks of Birds fully functional I went back to see if I could get the matrix data to work. After much effort I had not success so I reverted to using the angle data.