6.837 Final Project ReportTeam 30Zac Warren, Blair Dunn, Ben Chun{ zwarren, bdunn, benchun } @ mit.edu AbstractThis project is an animated movie about a police officer entering a Boston fraternity house. Itwas modeled, animated, and rendered using AutoCAD 13 and Alias | Wavefront Studio. IntroductionAfter reviewing our design criteria we opted to use commercially available 3D modeling andanimation software to produce a short, humorous animation. We believe that as computerresources continue to become more powerful and more (economically) available to thepublic, this type of activity will move beyond the realm of the computer graphics studentsallowing children, artists, homemakers, and people from every walk of life to tell ananimated story of their own. From our knowledge of computer graphics and the material covered in 6.837, we have agreater understanding of the advanced techniques used by the Alias | Wavefront software tomodel and render scenes and animation. Our knowledge of the subject allows us to betterutilize such a tool and gives us a greater appreciation of the complexity involved in makingthis functionality available via a user interface. For example, understanding the trade-offbetween ray tracing and ray casting and the relative levels of complexity within each allowsus to make educated decisions about how to render our wire frames. GoalsInspired by recent events occuring around MIT, especially on the Boston side of the river,we decided to construct a three-dimensional animation sequence involving a Boston Policeofficer entering a fraternity house. The following are significant requirements of the project: 1. Develop a three-dimensional model of our house at 526 Beacon Street. 2. Implement realistic character models. 3. Create realistic first-person camera movements for the police officer. 4. Use the tools we generate to tell an interesting story in a cinematic way. Our original goal was to produce approximately one minute of video (1800 still frames). Wedeemed the most difficult portions of the project to be the complexity encountered indeveloping a three-dimensional model of our house and simulating the first-person point ofview in terms of camera movements. Once these are accomplished we will have produced aclever and entertaining animation. AchievementsThe ModelThe first step in accomplishing our goals was to build a detailed model of the first 3 floors ofour house in Studio. To assist our efforts in achieving this goal we turned to our housearchitect, Mark Landsberg. Mark has been working for our alumni corporation since hedesigned the renovations done in 1988. He responded by to our request for help with a verylarge DXF file containing detailed floor plans of our house as well as elevations for the frontand rear. At first we had difficulty getting the DXF file to open in Alias. After attempting to useseveral different tools, we eventually opened the DXF file in ProEngineer and then exportedit again. Opening this new file in AutoCAD, we proceeded to remove all unnecessary linesand measurements from the original file before exporting a final trimmed down version ofour floor plans for use in Alias. We had expected this to be a quick, preliminary step inproducing our movie. In actuality, simply preparing the file for use in Alias consumed asignificant amount of time. From this point the task remained to extract a three-dimensional model from ourtwo-dimensional floor plans and fron and rear views of the house. Spreading the plans of thefirst three floors vertically and attaching the front and rear views, we had a rough outline ofthe house. From here, we implemented additional planes, surfaces, and cubes to define thewalls, floors, stairs, and other objects of interest in an attempt to make our house come tolife. Below is a view of portions of the wire frame (the front and rear layers of the modelhave been made invisible for ease of viewing).This image shows a wire frame view of our house model, something we worked withfrequently in Studio. As we proceeded in the development of our house model, we would delete the original DXFlines created when the floor plans were imported. Essentially, they acted as guides to showus how to model the complexities of our house. We also noted very early in the process thatwe only need model the areas of the house that will be visible during the rendering of theanimation. Concerned about the number of objects present and the resulting time required forrendering we analyzed the engineering trade-offs versus artistic achievement deciding tokeep certain doors opened or closed based on relevence to our animation. The model consists of not only geometry, but also material and color information. Thisinformation is encoded by shaders. Studio allowed us to preview the basic diffuse color ofthe shaders. Each primitive in the scene is assigned a shader which controls its materialproperties for ray tracing, as well as texture mapping. This images shows the "shade" display toggle turned on, useful not only for checkingshader assignments, but also for better visualizing the geometry (since it showsocclusion).To complete the model, we needed to add light sources that matched up with the real lightsin the house as well as making sure that they provided enough light to generate a goodrendering of the scene. Texture maps for wooden surfaces also enhanced the realism of ourrendered scenes, so we added them as well. A few difficulties arose from the size of themodel versus the texture mappings (especially the wood). We generated the model on amuch smaller metric scale than the actual size of our house to reduce the precision necessaryfor aligning objects. As a result we had to experiment with variations of each texturemapping to make the effects seem realistic. This image shows a rendered view, with texture mapping and light sources. The CharactersAfter building the model, we needed to add the characters into the scenes. The first step tothis process was creating the actual character models. Using alias’s character model as a basis, the body was muscularily enhanced to create a morerealistic portrait of the "good guys." This was done through the use of keypoints and hulls tostretch out the arms and chest so that they appear more muscular. The lips were alsoenhanced as to give a slight smirk of confidence. Various texture maps and bump maps were used to present a more realistic and futuristiccharacter image. The hair surface was created by splitting up
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