I worked with a partner to create this 3D graphics rendering of the academic quad at Wellesley.
Press "g" to start the animation, "1" to advance one frame, or spacebar
to stop the animation - and just reload the page to reset!
We constructed all geometries from scratch, including all the buildings and the iconic Wellesley lamps.
I built the entirety of Jewett and Green Hall, (the first and last buildings seen in one full rotation)
as well as all of the lamps, the overall positioning of the scene, the movement of the camera, and the
GUI controls that allow for changes in time of day and season. You can find our description here.
The Iconic Wellesley Lamps
The first thing I created for this project was the Wellesley lamp, which involved several unique geometries and complex curves.
Here is an image of the lamp from aerial perspective.
I used hierarchical modeling in making several different meshes to
create the actual lamp object, then another to create an object for the
pole, and finally one for the base before constructing a lampost object that
contained all these objects.
This image shows a close-up of the details of the lamp that took the
longest amount of time to perfect. I used several different objects to create the
unique shape of the Wellesley lamp, and also used bezier curves to create the pieces
that adorn the sides of the lamp as well as the spiral pole.
Jewett
Creating Jewett involved a combination of many different geometries and loops in order to create
the unique structure of the building and its staircases.
Here is an image of our Jewett rendering from the front view.
It is mainly built out of several box geometries, and there are several
tube geometries to form the vents on the left building. The 'windows' are
made out of tube geometries surrounding transparent plane geometries.
The most challenging part of Jewett was definitely the lower
area with the staircases. I looped through and created a new stair, translating it a bit
more each time to get the effect I wanted. The inner walls of the staircases are trapezoidal in shape,
made by heavily compressing a cylinder geometry.
Green Hall
Green Hall was constructed similarly to Jewett, with more complex texture mapping on the tower portion.
Here is an image of my interpretation of Green Hall from the top.
It is mainly built out of several barn-shaped geometries piercing through a central
barn, with two other larger barns on each side. Galen Stone Tower is built out
a box geometry with a boxy cylinder geometry attached to each corner.
One of the more challenging parts of creating the geometry was
texture mapping throughout. I had to carefully map specific parts of the barn
geometry to particular material indice in
order to create the brick texture and the roof texture. I used a similar technique to
the stairs to create the windows with texture mapped plane geometries. I also texture mapped
the pattern of the tower onto each side of the box geometry, and added tubes to
integrate the flat texture and the 3D rendering. The door is also texture mapped
and I used blending to achieve the look.
Final Additions
The final thing I added was GUI controls for a more interactive experience.
I used a loop with a timeout to create
a snowfall effect. I had to modify it slightly to fit the size of our scene
and also generate natural-looking snowfalls repeatedly.
Next I created a nighttime version, which changed the lighting and colors.
In the night view, the background scene color is changed to be a night sky color, and
the ambient light is removed. The spotlight is turned up slightly so the buildings are
visible, and the lamps are all turned "on."
This image combines all the new features, the night view with the snow on.
Please scroll up to our demo above to see the GUI in action!
