3D Modeling & Animation

Artifact 1

Most of the tools that I used were just creating individual objects and placing them next to one another.  The project itself could almost exclusively be made with basic transformations, save for the bend tool and the edit poly tool that I used to create the seat. To make the bike, I started with the frame, which is made entirely of basic cylinders attached to one another. After the frame, I made the wheels, which is textured with the array tool. Then, I followed that up with the pedals and the gears which were much more complex shapes, requiring that I use the Pro boolean tool. Finally, I made the chain with a large amount of smaller cylinders, which caused a large problem. The main challenge I encountered had to do with the poly count. The poly count for some of the parts, like the chain, was much too high. In order to fix the chain, I remade it entirely with shapes that had less unnecessary polygons. There are 265,590 polygons in my model.

Artifact 2

In order to create this model, I had to uvw unwrap two main parts of the model. Those being the two reflectors and the top part of the frame. All of the other parts are a single color and therefore, don't need to be unwrapped. The two unwrapped objects were placed in photoshop so that they could have the important parts of the texture facing the correct direction. The reflectors were also given a displacement map to imitate the bumps. The other portions were textured in the slate material editor, where some of them were given increased metalness to make them shinier and reflect other parts of the model. The main challenge I encountered was mainly just making sure that the objects were properly reflecting other parts of the object. I had to constantly change and re-change the metalness and the lighting to make the shiny parts of the bike seem like real metal.

Artifact 3

In order to create this artifact, I used the bend tool for the lightpost and for the sides of the bench. Additionally, to create the top of the light and making the planks rounded at the edge, I used the Edit Poly feature. I textured the bench with a regular wood texture, without making a UVW unwrap because the planks themselves have regular geometry that doesn't require any unwrapping. The only main difficulty was making the light at the correct the correct intensity to make objects only slightly visible outside of the lamp's area. Also I encountered difficulty when I was trying to make the bench look more like it fit into the darker night scene.

Artifact 4

In order to create this artifact, I used a combination of the manual and auto key tools to animate the bike's movement as well as the fluorescent street lamp flickering. The flicker was obtained by having an initial frame at normal intensity, and then a couple of frames later, a much dimmer intensity, and finally a frame at normal brightness shortly after. For some unknown reason, during this process, messing with the intensity in manual mode resulted in no change even though a new key frame displayed on the timeline. To resolve this, I tried many things, until revisiting the 4 corners project guide, which instructed the use of the auto key mode, which ended up working. Additionally, apart from basic movement forward and the rotation of the wheels and pedal attachments, I had to figure out how to make the pedals themselves follow the relative position of the end of the connectors without rotating. In order to do this, after much trial and error using the link tool, I figured out that I needed to remove all of the pedals' preexisting key frames and place its pivot point at the same point as the attachment piece's. On top of all of that, I tweaked a few things, like adding a reflector to the back of the bike under the seat.

Artifact 5

In order to create this artifact, I modified some of the lighting parameter to make it more realistic, changed some of the materials to reflect light less, and finally and most significantly, I added movement to the camera. The camera's movement goes forward with slight shaking to mimic a person walking. Then it turns to look left quickly, then right, and then back towards the bike. In order to properly loop the animation, the camera then "walks" back towards its starting position. The materials used for the bench and the pavement were too reflective and showed the origin of the light far too much. Additionally, I noticed that the lights appeared much brighter in the final render than in the window, despite the fact that it was in "use scene lighting mode". In order to counteract this, I dimmed all the lights significantly to a more reasonable amount. The main problem, other than the viewport being misleading, was the time that it took to render the finished product. To overcome this, I rendered the video and then used "lock" instead of "sign out" so that it would render even without my being there.