Arthur Choi and Anton Shevchenko

CS 418 Spring 1998

Final Project: JoBot

    For our final project, we modeled a robot flying through a night city scene.  Here is how we designed/modeled various components of our animation.

    Giant Robot: 100% designed in DX. Inspiration from many sources; essentially, Giant Robot is a bastardization of many beloved robotic and nonrobotic characters (i.e. MegaMan, Gundam, Boba Fett, Birdman).  Designed using multiple layers of heirarchical modeling: fingers, forearm, arm, head, wings, breastplate, torso, legs, leg plates, lower leg all move and rotate, most in multiple directions and along multiple axes.  All components constructed with vertex/face lists or parametric surfaces of low deltas (e.g. wings are topped cylinders with 7 data points in construct module).  Elbow cables "stretch" as arm flexes.  Pretty sweet, eh.

    Giant Robot motion: Movement defined by linear and trigonometric functions.

    Giant Robot's gun: All cylinders.  Gun barrels rotate as it fires long transparent orange spheres.

    Giant Robot's path: Movement defined by linear and trigonometric functions. X-Y movement independent of Z movement.  Bot position, camera position, and camera look to are all defined using the same function, bot the bot is .2 ahead of camera look to, and camera look to is .8 ahead of camera position, in terms of path counts.  Robot rotates as he flies, depending on which direction he's facing, or if he's turning.  Note that Giant Robot cleverly dodges obstacles in his path, building, billboards, other large inanimate objects.

    Giant Robot's dance: Giant Robot digs the groovy beats.

    The buildings are made of planes built using CONSTRUCT modules, which are then texture mapped mathematically.  So, the yellow windows are random pixels set to a yellowish color.  For round/other shaped buildings/building parts, the texture mapped planes are then stretched into the appropriate surface (e.g. a cylinder, a sphere, etc.).

    Most buildings have a moving part.  For example, some have four light beacons on the top which flash (depending on the SEQUENCER value), elevators going up and down (via a sinusoidal function), or a rotating logo at the top.

    The spinning building rotates around the Z-axis and shines four projector lights at the ground and the surrounding buildings.  Each projector light is a plane molded into a cone, assigned a color based on its distance from the origin of the cone, and then made semi-transparent.  So, at the sharp end of the cone, the color is white and the further away from that end, the darker the color of the cone becomes.  This gives the illusion of light dissipating the further it is from its source.

    The three light projector macros consist of three of these "light cones," rotating around the Z-axis and then each one set at 20 degrees from the vertical and rotating +/- 5 degrees around the X-axis, each with a different phase delay.  This looks like those dancing projectors you sometimes see at night. Pretty neat effect.

    There is a fog flowing through the city at constant velocity (translated via the SEQUENCER value). It is based on the cloud built using the FFT module from Lab 8.  The fog "plane" is actually twice as long as the city in the Y-direction but it appears to be the same length as the city because a CLIPBOX clips its size to be that of the city.  So, this way, the fog flows through the city without any of its sides sticking out of the city.

    Mirrored Building: Building is composed of 4 planes with ShowConnections, only 1 side is "mirrored." We display the image from a camera positioned at the center of the building plane, directed a direction R=2(N dot L)N-L where L is the view direction. So R is the reflection when L hits the surface. (Note: robot does not properly reflect, but revolving lights reflect adequately: lack of resolution/memory)