House Assignment: The House floors and walls are nothing but a bunch of really flat cubes. The living room stairs were made with the object subtraction tool. The living room finish is a procedural wood finish. The kitchen floor is actually kitchen tile. The design was found from an image an internet web site selling kitchen tile. The image was downloaded and mapped to the floor with a high level of vertical and horizontal repetitions. In order to maintain uniformity, a special material library (house.mlb) was created. That way if we ever needed to fix something it could be done quickly. The door arch was made by subtracting a cylinder and a sphere from a very flat cube. Since the wall with the door arch exists on the kitchen side as both an outside wall and an inside wall, a very flat cube was placed over the outside part so the wall could appear to be two colors. Planes could have been used on most walls, but cubes worked out better because it allowed for a little bit of a fudge factor when lining things up. It also worked well because it allowed the back half of the light switch to be burried in the wall. Lighting was achieved in a number of places by gluing light sources to objects. The lights, obvious have light sources in them. The refrigerator has a light source in it. The oven also has a very dim red light in it to appear that the oven coils are hot and lighting the inside. The couches were made with the smooth quad devide and deformation tools to make them appear worn and soft. The advantage is a very realistic couch, the disadvantage, is a very large object file. Each couch has over 21,000 verticies and 16,000 faces. Bird Assignment: The bird for the most part, is a collection of spheres. The body, knees, head, eyes, eyelids, claws, and claw joints were all made with spheres and the deformation tool which allowed certain verticies to be stretched and allowed edges to be twisted. The wings and tail feathers are simple planes created with the spline tool. They were then colored. All feathers are actually the same blue color. However, when they are twisted at slightly different angles, the refraction causes the appearance that they are different colors. In order to get the level of detail for a nice up close view of the bird, the number of faces on the spheres were turned up to get a very fine mesh. The original bird had over 20,000 verticies and 18,000 faces. However, in animation, all this detail was not needed. Once it was time for animation, the polygon reduction tool was used to reduce the bird detail to 11,900 verticies and 4,800 faces. This cut the rendering time by 75%. A 60 second animation required over 4 hours to render on a 100 Mhz Pentium. Once the bird was done, the axes tool was used to rotate the Z-Axis of the object to point towards the bird's head from it's tail. Next a 30 frame animation was made of the bird flapping it's wing once. The bird is more of a glider than a flapper, so it actually takes longer for the upbeat of the wings than the downbeat. Once that animation was done, the animation project window was used to create a local animation of the wings flapping. From that point on, no matter where you move the bird and at what speed, the local object will always flap it's wing once per second without any further action done to the wings. For the flight path, a spline curve was created manually with the path tool. It includes movement in the X, Y, and Z planes. The bird was set with the "look ahead" attribute. The causes the Z-axis of the bird and it's spline path to always be tagent at the bird's center of axis. Since the bird's Z-axis points from back to front, the bird is always pointing in the direction it is flying. Next a camera was positioned in the scene. The camera was set with the "look at" attribute so that througout the animation, the camera was always centered on the bird without having to create key frames for the camera. When it came time for animation, the movie was done from the camera's perspective. Next objects were placed into the scene so that there would be frames of reference to see the bird's motion. Finally, a quick animation was done. The actuall spline path was made to be less than 3 seconds. This way, proof animations could be done quickly to make sure everything looked right without taking all night to render. Once it was done, the animation project window was used to stretch out the animation time to one minute, and the scene was rendered.