Final Deliverable

The "goods" (graphics and animations) are on our main project page

Our final deliverable involved the following aspects:

1. Complete Scene

OK, so the chair, table, cup, saucer, throw rug, hearth, bookcase, carpet, wall, book, firelogs and stand, and some really nice fireplace tools are done. The steam and fire are dynamic and somewhat cool. The window and water drops were tossed out, since they would require a higher resolution image to be effective, and that would make for a slow animation... everything's a tradeoff.

2. Animation of all dynamic elements

The fire burns, the steam steams. Life is good.

3. Optional extras

The fireplace tools and throw rug made it in, but not the cat or person.. sorry.

Writeup

Or, "How we made this all look easy, but it was really hard"

We began this project by designing the scene and laying out where the objects would lie. [See Figures 1 and 2] This was easy. Then we located/made/modified the textures and shaders we would use. These included the following:

built-in carpet shader (for the carpet)
built-in wood shader (table, bookcase, floorboard, fireplace tool handles, and fire wood)
built-in metal shader (fireplace tools)
built-in plastic shader (teacup and saucer)
built-in matte shader (inside of fireplace, parts of fireplace tools, book on table, and log holder)
built-in texturemap shader (wallpaper, books in bookcase, and pages of the book on the table)
velvet shader we found on the web (for the chair)
brick shader found on the web (fireplace)
modified version of above brick shader to do the fireplace arch properly
last minute shader for the throw rug to make it more interesting
steam shader we made, based on a turbulence function found on the web
fire shader found on the web and modified to be less yellow
wallpaper as a texture map which Dawn designed in xpaint
pages showing in the book on the table we made
books and more books as a texture map for the bookcase (hey, they didn't need detail)
rmannotes.sl, an include file required by some of the shaders

The bricks, probably gave the most grief. The beautiful arch on the hearth you see was the result of Dawn's tireless tinkering with polar coordinates and modifications to the brick shader. Any way, we modeled all of the objects, no trivial task, as some of my more interesting mistakes show. So in the end we had the following objects:

chair -- source
table -- source underneath the teacup
teacup -- closeup, animation with steam, silly teacup animation and source
book -- source
fireplace -- animation of the fire burning, involved source models for the fireplace, fire itself, and the firelog holder
fireplace tools -- closeup, animation, and source
throw rug -- source
bookcase -- bookcase
wall -- source for the back wall and items attached to it

All of the above items were modeled using constructive solid geometry of the primitives sphere, disk, cylinder, cone, torus, paraboloid, and polygon (for rectangular solids) as well as copius amounts of translation, rotation, and some scaling.

and the following miscellaneous files:

room -- the source which brings all of the elements of the room together
prism -- source for a rectangular solid we used in many of the models
steam -- the source for the dynamic effects we used to model the teacup steam
fire -- source for the dynamic effects we used to model the fire in the fireplace

This done, we went on to work on the animation. The fire was modeled by mapping a flame shader onto a bicubic patch mesh. With each itteration, the patch mesh control points are randomly modified (increased) until they exceeded a threshold, at which point they were dropped back down to the lowest level. The lighting effects created by it were then modeled by attaching the point light sources on the control points of the mesh, (minus a constant to keep the mini-fireballs inside the firepit), which varied in brightness and color based on their distance from the "center" of the flame. The farther away from the center of the flame the light source is, the redder the light color is and the lower the light intensity is.

Unfortunately, we couldn't get shadow maps quite working, so some of the lighting "features" around the fireplace are a little odd (for instance, the glowing walls and distinct lack of cast shadows). In order to do shadow maps for the fire, we would have to (since the lights are point light sources) make six shadow maps (one for each direction) for each of the 12 light sources in the fire for each frame of animation. Making a shadow map involves moving the camera to the location of the light source, which would be a great inconvenience and time suck to have to do this for all the light sources, frames and directions.

To do the steam, we studied real steam effects by watching water boil. The steam is also a bicubic patch mesh, based on a ranomized cone-ish shape. There are two meshes: one that starts out high and one that starts out low. Each mesh rises to a threshold level, at which point it falls to a lower "start" level, while the other mesh still rises. This results in the effect of constant steam rising to a point. The steam shader then uses a turbulence function to determine the transparency/translucency of the mesh at each point.

Dawn E., CS184-ax.
David B., CS184-ap.
cs184 Spring 97.