Final Project - Rendition Of Cynthia McKean's Sculpture #16 - CSE 167

Student: Daniel Lay

Comments

The actual sculpture can be viewed at http://www.artroundtown.com/sculp-2001/16.html


click here to run the executable

List of figures

I started this project by trying to build geometry similar to the Cynthia McKean’s Sculpture #16. The scene is lit with diffuse lights of the colors red, white, and blue. The red and blue colors help add contrast of temperature while the white light settles the rest of the colors.

The lamp posts were created by using a cone, sphere, and scaled cubes that were rotated in an interesting way. The basic problem with building geometry is that it can be a little time consuming. I spend a lot of time changing one variable and then recompiling to see how it all looked. After creating the right look for the lamp I put the instructions in a function that I called 4 times to create 4 copies. Lamps were place in symmetrical locations for aesthetic value.

The actual sculpture took the same idea but added some more complexity. I started first by just creating squares that are repeated in the sculpture. Again, a lot of tweaking went on in trying to get them right. I made two cubes that I scaled in the x direction. Then I did the same thing again in the y direction. I ran into a little bit of a problem because the 4 rectangles used to create the square were exactly the same. The problem is that when these rectangles are tangent to each other you would get a tic tac toe looking square. To compensate for this I scaled two of the rectangles to make them a little longer than the others. After finally creating the square I stored all of that information in a function that I called four times. Each copy was rotated appropriately to mimic the photo.

After referring to Professor Buss’ code on texture mapping I searched the web and chose marble textures to use for my model. Contrast of color is exhibited by choosing complimentary colors blue-green and red-orange. At first I had a lot of trouble trying to import the images into the program. While they were bitmaps, they were not 24-bit. Using adobe Photoshop, I created a new image with better resolution and saved it as a 24-bit bitmap. I imported the texture maps onto planes that were the same size as the face of the geometry they are used on. When the right size was met I place them in the model so they lay tangent to the surface.

I noticed there were funny looking white lines in my texture maps called z-fighting. To compensate for this I used opengl’s offset tools to set an offset to the plane and the surface it was tangent to. This worked successfully! Now I can sleep.. ZzzZZz