Jacob Zimmer - ENDS 170 Project 3

Project 3 consisted of exporting our Revit model of our house to Autodesk Viz and apply realistic textures and lighting. This was a fairly simple process; Using a combination of preset materials and pictures I found, I went through the house applying them to objects, hiding layers that blocked them. Viz makes this process rather easy by applying a given material to all objects in the same layer at once. However, for objects like the walls, I had to use the EditMesh modifier to select specific parts of specific walls to which I would apply a material.

For the background, I encased the entire scene in a huge cylinder and reversed the normals so that the materials applied to it would render. I then applied a tiling grass material to the bottom face of the cylinder and a picture of the sky onto the vertical faces. I deleted the top face. This provided a convincing horizon and sky, and the tiling of my grass texture was not too noticeable. For lighting I applied a skylight outside to simulate daylight, and used omni lights to light the inside of the house.


We were required to render 2 external views of the house at 800x600 resolution, one as an aerial view and one from eye-level.

external rendering one:

This rendering shows the front of the house, most prominently the exterior of the foyer, dining room, and green roof. I had some trouble getting the exterior of the house to be light enough, but enabling final gather solved my problem.

exterior rendering two:

This rendering is an eye-level perspective taken from outside the master bedroom and facing the south side of the house showing the exterior of the living room including the patio and awning. The background treatment is especially noticeable in this rendering, and in my opinion it works well with the lighting of the house.

We also were asked to render two movies: an aerial fly-around and a walkthrough at eye-level.

fly-around:

This movie was relatively easy to make. We were required to use a free camera. I first made an oval path using splines and constrained the camera to it. I oriented along the correct axis in relation to the path and rotated it to look slightly downward. I then set the length of the time slider to 300 frames and set a keyframe at the end with the camera having traveled 100% of the path.

walkthrough:

This movie was more complicated than the fly-around, but I did not encounter any problems setting it up(rendering is another story). This time we were to use a target camera. Again the first step was to make a path using a spline and constrain the camera to it. Also, like the fly-around, I only used one keyframe for the camera animation, which set a smooth speed all the way through. The downside to this, in hindsight, is that the outside potion of the movie feels slow in comparison to the inside due to fewer turns or changes in view. After the camera was moving at a comfortable speed, I animated the camera's target(largely from the top view watching the results in the camera's viewport) using autokey and creating a key every 25-100 frames. The result of using a camera on a path is a smooth animation that easily avoids jumpy turns or running through walls.