Monocular Depth Cues

This is Final #4 in which we need to find Monocular Depth Cues in a virtual world.  I chose to use Avaya to find all six cues. It is a final exercise from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Discovering Computer Graphics. For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc.


This is an example of Size Differences.  The two chairs are the same size, but the chair that is closer to me is larger than the one that it is further away in order to trick the viewer/user in to thinking that this 2-D image is actually 3-D.

For Occlusion, I chose this cubicle (or workspace or I don't know what to call it) which appears to be blocking the red wall behind it.  Since it seems that the wall is being blocked, the viewer has a sense of the front-to-back order of the objects.  My avatar's head helps out the example even more.  Since it's blocking part of the grey wall, you get an even further sense of the order of the objects.

 There were plenty of examples of lighting and shading.  Between sky lights, windows, and overhead lighting, there were plenty of options to choose from.  I thought this one was interesting because this one was caused from overhead lighting and the tables and chairs cast shadows on the floor to help create the sense of 3-dimensionality of the objects.  Additionally, you can see a bit of a shadow from my avatar, helping to make it look like it's 3-D. 

For the example of texture density, I used a shot of this stone wall, which was one of the few good examples of texture to use in this environment.  I didn't notice the lack of texture in Avaya until looking for possibilities for this example.  The stones which are closest are largest while those further away appear smaller and more densely packed together.  I also considered using this image to illustrate Atmospheric Perspective, because the stones further away look fuzzier than the ones closest.

For Linear Perspective, I chose this view down a hallway.  Unfortunately it's not long enough for you to get a true vanishing point where the two sides of the hallway meet, but you definitely get a sense of this perspective from the way that the lines of the hallway are drawn.  The viewer gets a sense of distance since the lines are angled so that they are moving towards each other. 

 

 

I took this screenshot for Atmospheric Perspective.  Here the same text is used on these different screens.  The text on the closer screen is quite easy to read, while the same text on the screens that are further away are blurry and unreadable. This helps to give a sense of what's close and what's far away.

MakeHuman Avatar

This is my Final #5 where I'm building an avatar in MakeHuman.  It is a final exercise from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Discovering Computer Graphics. For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc.

I ran into a big problem right away - I wasn't able to upload a photo of myself so it looks like I'll need to construct an avatar from scratch.  Here is the opening image in MakeHuman.  This is supposed to be the gender-neutral avatar, but it still looks pretty feminine to me!

I've moved the sliders to change the body macro features on my avatar:

Here I've modified the body details:

Now I'm on to the face!  There are 30 different modifiers for the eyes - crazy!

The program lets you move around the avatar so you can see the body from different angles.  This was especially helpful when working on some of the facial details like the nose.

Now on to the jaw! The different angles were key here as well.

I've just found the heart-shaped head so I've changed that detail.  It's interesting, I feel that the face/head shape is one of the bigger things to change so you'd think that would be at the top of the list instead of the eyes.

Now I've gone into the library and added hair.  I chose what looked like curly blonde hair, but it appeared like this.  Eek!!

 Here's a view of the hair from above.  It looks like a really bad ad for hair plugs!

 I had the most fun with the expressions.  This smile is creepy!

Eeeek!

The laughing one is fun, but a lot of these expressions have the eyes closed which is kind of annoying.

Final expression choice - smiling and relaxed.

Here's my overall avatar:

I ran into several problems.  One was that I couldn't figure out how to put on clothes so I'm rocking the naked look.  Also, I couldn't save poses.  While the avatar is in the classic vitruvian man pose, I wanted to have it look a little more relaxed.  In the poses screen I modified it so the arms were hanging down.  However, one time when I did this the program crashed on me.  Another time the blue that highlights the body part that you'd like to move wouldn't go away and it looked like I had a funky blue arm tattoo.  A few times I changed the sliders so the arms should have moved but they were still stiffly out to the sides. Finally I got the arms to hand down but when I clicked on another option they went right back where they started.  I guess it just wasn't meant to be!

Final #3

This is a set of screenshots showing my class working on building a house together in Cloud Party Time. It is a final exercise from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Discovering Computer Graphics. For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc. 

Here I am just getting started.  I offered to build the porch, not realizing how tedious it would be.  I'm taking long blocks of wood and rotating them beside one of the walls of the house:

 This is me in the midst of rotating one of the long blocks.  Since we were building on a slight hill, it made it slightly challenging to build the porch, but it just meant that some of the blocks of wood were slightly sunken into the ground.

Here's another image of me rotating wood to build the porch.  I'm surrounded by my construction cloud classmates as we're all hard at work.

 Oh, imagine that yet another image of me rotating wood.  I didn't realize until later that it was possible to copy objects so I could have saved a ton of time! D'oh!  Some of my classmates are helping out and adding details to make the porch prettier.

 Here's a shot of the side of the house.  After building the porch, I added some metal balls and glass tubes for the fun of it.

Taking a look at the porch from another angle.  Right around then, my classmates and I decided to add on to it, but most of us found that we had reached maximum capacity for the number of objects that we could build.  In this shot you can also see the name of stranger Jesse Thompson who came over and walked around our house.  Creeper.  He also stood around and watched our building process.  He was probably one of the people who helped to build the amazing pool, soccer field, and mini golf arena nearby.

A few of us are standing back and admiring the house.  My favorite part about this image is that it looks like the gargoyle in the right is playing soccer.

I have a twin!

Once we discovered that the cannon can fire, we played with it for a while and shot ourselves.

Group shot!  I'm so proud of my classmates, they all did a great job both on the house and in the class.

Here's the list in google hangouts of both what we planned on doing and what we ended up doing:

Slideshow in Wonderland

Here's the link to the PDF version of my slideshow: https://wfs.bc.edu/rear/Discovering%20Computer%20Graphics/mypresentation2.pdf

Here are the screenshots me looking at the slideshow in Wonderland.  The first eight are of me looking at the individual slides and the last one is me looking at the overall spread of them.  It was a bit of a pain to get this to work initially but it was pretty cool when it finally did!

Avaya

Here is my avatar in Avaya looking much more professional than I ever am:

Class 11, Roll Call 2

Gameboard 2, Class 11