CS 148 Fall 2021-2022

<aside> πŸ’‘ Due Date: Friday, November 12th 2021 by 7 pm PT

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Follow the instructions carefully. If you encounter any problems in the setup, please do not hesitate to reach out to CAs on Piazza or attend office hours on Nooks.

Be aware of the Checkpoints below. Make sure you complete each one since we will grade based on them.

"Growing" geometry. Source: Nervous System.

"Growing" geometry. Source: Nervous System.

The goal of this assignment is to help you get more comfortable with modeling geometry in Blender, and to start building your scene for your final project. You will become familiar with the process of taking a piece of geometry, whether it be one you found or one you created, and placing it into your scene.

It is highly recommended that you use this assignment as a milestone towards your final project, as you will be able to get some preliminary feedback from the teaching team. This assignment will focus on only the geometry aspect, so there will be no texturing, lighting, or coding, but it’s still a good idea to start thinking about how you might want the final scene to look.

I. Importing 3D Models

<aside> πŸ“– While we have primarily worked with primitive meshes (e.g. cubes, spheres, etc.) in previous homework assignments, there are infinite possibilities for models one might create! We saw examples of past final projects in lecture, where students leveraged free online resources to incorporate some more complex 3D models in their scenes. In this section, you will be given some pointers on how to get started exploring the breadth of resources online, and you will choose and import a model for your own scene.

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Overview at a high-level:

  1. Find a model
  2. Download the model
  3. Import the object in Blender
  4. Optional: modify the object to work with your scene

I.1 Find a 3D model to use

It is highly recommended that you choose models that are available in the Blend (.blend) or wavefront(.obj) / filmbox (.fbx) file format.

You've had some experience working with Blend files in previous homework assignments; OBJ is another format for representing 3D geometry. OBJ files store only an object's geometry data (note that it doesn't store data on textures, materials, etc.). If you open it with XCode (Mac) and 3D Builder (Windows), you can get a preview of what the object looks like before loading it in Blender. OBJ is a human-readable file format, so to view the data itself, you can open it with any text editor of your choice. If you have never worked with the OBJ file format before and want to better understand what each line in the data represents (e.g. 'v', 'f', etc.), you might find this website helpful. FBX is another industry-standard format that can pack up texture, skeleton, animation, and even camera.

There are many free resources for finding meshes online, but here are some cool places you might start: