ME 498 Gallery

In the summer of 2003 I took the course ME (or MENGR, Mechanical Engineering) 498 for fun. It was ostensibly about visualization, but practically just about having fun with 3D Studio.

Overall, the course taught me that 3D modelling is a surprisingly laborious task. It is rewarding, however. One nice characteristic of this craft is that after you've spent 24 hours modelling something, you can go to sleep for 12 hours while the darn thing renders. :)

Here's a sample of some things I made. Enjoy.

ME 498 Intro

I decided to make a startup animation sequence to later animations I would produce, but ended up not using it in other places. It resembles the familiar 20th Century Fox logo. The abacus was an attempt at playing with light and shadows. The Robot hand was an example of inverse kinematics. The toughest part in this was making the smooth chamfers, aligning the parts and choosing the material properties so they give the illusion of matte plastic or metal connected pieces. Unfortunately, the shadows did not come out nicely.

MENGR498 logo: avi (0.6MB)

Abacus: jpg (1024x768, 1.1M)

Robot hand: avi (2.9MB)

Heads

Making a face or head in a 3D modelling program is not too difficult, because it simply requires the movement of control nodes of a NURBS mesh chosen symmertrically about the middle of the face. But the process can be tedious. So, I've documented the various stages of this process. Here are screenshots of a fly-by animation I made.

Heads: jpg (640x480, 181KB)	Heads: jpg (640x480, 183KB)	Heads: jpg (640x480, 186KB)
Heads: jpg (640x480, 173KB)	Heads: jpg (640x480, 226KB)	Heads: jpg (640x480, 186KB)
Heads: avi #1 (2.4MB) avi #2 (4.4MB)

Shadows and nuts

The "shades" animation was an attampt at playing with light and shadow in the context of an animation. It would've worked out much better if the animated object was more interesting. The Nuts are a final project. It is not an animation, just a (large) still image. The first rendering turned out too dark, so I made it lighter; I'm not sure if this was done in an external program, or re-rendered with different lighting conditions.

Shades: avi (0.7M)

Nut: jpg (1120x630, 431KB) jpg (3200x1800, 2.3MB)

Nut, lighter: jpg (1120x630, 135KB) jpg (3200x1800, 3.3MB)