Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-12-21 05:05 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-12-21 05:05 pm
You're all clear, kid, now let's blow this thing and go home!
Operation WRITE ALL THE ESSAYS has reported victory!
*flump* After... three hours of sleep in the past two days, a distinct lack of remembering to eat, and approximately thirty hours straight that were spent either writing essays, taking exams, or working on my graphics project, literally without a break... it's over. All my stuff's in. The French essay clocked in at 33 pages. I did not fail any exams (unless I was hallucinating that they weren't too difficult, which at this point is not outside the realm of possibility). All my library books are turned in and the ILL office forgives me for holding onto that one thing for way too long. I did not go on any axe-murdering sprees. The semester from hell is over.
In celebration of the stupid shit people do when they haven't slept enough, I give you the full write-up of my computer graphics final project. I take no responsibility for any idiocy, failed attempts at humor, or technical incompetence displayed therein.
For my final project I indulged my inner Star Wars geek and modeled a lightsaber. This is possibly stretching the “ everyday object” part of the assignment, but hey, if you’re a Sith Lord, that thing’s going to be sitting on your desk along every day with your Evil Overlord of the Year coffee mug while you go about your daily business of keeping the galaxy in a stranglehold of imperial terror. What else are you going to do, play Tetris? Design trebuchets out of rubber bands and pencils to keep up your cubicle warfare with Grand Moff Tarkin? Stare out the windows of your planet-destroying superweapon idly pondering which incompetent subordinate you’re going to Force-strangle next? You might as well model that lightsaber, it’s all you’ve got left to remember the ways of the Force now that you’ve killed all the Jedi.
Your sad devotion to that ancient religion hasn’ t helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes yet, but it sure helps you bend POV-ray to your iron will. Model your lightsaber? How hard could that be? It’s just a bunch of CSG operations, right? Make a shiny chrome cylinder for the handle, union on some grips here, a black cylinder with a box for the power button there, and play around with difference and superellipsoids until the business end starts looking right. It takes a lot of fiddling and transformations, but eventually you get it looking like the real thing.
Great, now you’ve got the hilt. You’re not going to send Obi-Wan Kenobi off to be one with the Force using that unless you manage to hit him really hard over the head with it. Stick it off in an include file and get to work on the fun part: the laser sword. You didn’t think it was going to be as easy as making a long cylinder and turning up the ambient, did you? Go ahead, try it. You now have a bright pink stick attached to your lightsaber hilt. That’s not going to strike terror into anyone’s heart; in fact, small children might mistake it for candy. If only you could make that thing glow.
But wait, maybe radiosity is the answer! You try this. You dig through the help files and read lots of online tutorials about how it works and how to bend it to the nefarious purpose of making objects glow. But impenetrable are the ways of radiosity, and long are its render times, and if you’d had that much patience you would never have turned to the Dark Side. So you take the quick and easy path and decide to just make it look like the thing’s glowing. Is there a way to do this by playing with finishes and color maps and transparency? None that’s immediately obvious. You’re going to have to put some effort in and learn how POV-ray handles its particle systems so your blade can be surrounded by an ominous red nimbus of death and potential severed limbs.
And then, just when you were on the point of trying to Force-choke the computer, victory! Not only are there tutorials aplenty on media effects in POV-ray, one of the effects is “emitting,” which looks like it’s giving off light but is really just adding its color to whatever rays pass through it! Stick it in a cylinder and you now have your very own glowing laser sword, and even if it won’t brighten up a dark room with its infernal light, at least it looks really cool. You just have to make sure and manipulate the lighting so as to conceal the fact that not only is it not really emitting light, the hazy part doesn’t even cast a shadow. In fact, make it so the whole blade doesn’t cast a shadow, since even that looks less silly than the clearly-defined shadow of a non-hazy, death-nimbus-free stick.
And now you’re done with your lightsaber and you need a scene to put it in. Well, you’ve got this far, why not model the rest of your desk? Someday your kids will grow up and want to know how you spent most of your time as a force of galaxy-wide terror, and then you’ll be able to show them the spiffy windows they’re building into the late-model Death Stars these days and your Evil Overlord of the Year souvenir mug. And then they’ll overthrow you and bring peace and justice to the galaxy. Life tends to throw you nasty surprises like that. But in the meantime, you can do a good deed for posterity and image-map the Imperial insignia onto your CSG-cylinders-and-torus mug. Don’t forget to make it a cylindrical map and adjust the scale, or those guys in the Imperial marketing and branding department will never forgive you for what you’ve done to their logo. If you’re really ambitious—and what Dark Lord isn’t?—find a nice image of your window overlooking the pitiless depths of space, and image-map it onto a gigantic hollowed-out sphere. Add a dark, reflective, and intimidatingly bare stretch of desk to put everything on, and it’ll start looking just like home.
As for some of the images to emerge from this exercise… well… if the Emperor ever asks, of course you’ll claim that levitating objects for fun is beneath the dignity of a Sith Lord, but he just doesn’t understand the day-to-day grind of galactic domination. Even Sith Lords get bored sometimes.
*flump* After... three hours of sleep in the past two days, a distinct lack of remembering to eat, and approximately thirty hours straight that were spent either writing essays, taking exams, or working on my graphics project, literally without a break... it's over. All my stuff's in. The French essay clocked in at 33 pages. I did not fail any exams (unless I was hallucinating that they weren't too difficult, which at this point is not outside the realm of possibility). All my library books are turned in and the ILL office forgives me for holding onto that one thing for way too long. I did not go on any axe-murdering sprees. The semester from hell is over.
In celebration of the stupid shit people do when they haven't slept enough, I give you the full write-up of my computer graphics final project. I take no responsibility for any idiocy, failed attempts at humor, or technical incompetence displayed therein.
For my final project I indulged my inner Star Wars geek and modeled a lightsaber. This is possibly stretching the “ everyday object” part of the assignment, but hey, if you’re a Sith Lord, that thing’s going to be sitting on your desk along every day with your Evil Overlord of the Year coffee mug while you go about your daily business of keeping the galaxy in a stranglehold of imperial terror. What else are you going to do, play Tetris? Design trebuchets out of rubber bands and pencils to keep up your cubicle warfare with Grand Moff Tarkin? Stare out the windows of your planet-destroying superweapon idly pondering which incompetent subordinate you’re going to Force-strangle next? You might as well model that lightsaber, it’s all you’ve got left to remember the ways of the Force now that you’ve killed all the Jedi.
Your sad devotion to that ancient religion hasn’ t helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes yet, but it sure helps you bend POV-ray to your iron will. Model your lightsaber? How hard could that be? It’s just a bunch of CSG operations, right? Make a shiny chrome cylinder for the handle, union on some grips here, a black cylinder with a box for the power button there, and play around with difference and superellipsoids until the business end starts looking right. It takes a lot of fiddling and transformations, but eventually you get it looking like the real thing.
Great, now you’ve got the hilt. You’re not going to send Obi-Wan Kenobi off to be one with the Force using that unless you manage to hit him really hard over the head with it. Stick it off in an include file and get to work on the fun part: the laser sword. You didn’t think it was going to be as easy as making a long cylinder and turning up the ambient, did you? Go ahead, try it. You now have a bright pink stick attached to your lightsaber hilt. That’s not going to strike terror into anyone’s heart; in fact, small children might mistake it for candy. If only you could make that thing glow.
But wait, maybe radiosity is the answer! You try this. You dig through the help files and read lots of online tutorials about how it works and how to bend it to the nefarious purpose of making objects glow. But impenetrable are the ways of radiosity, and long are its render times, and if you’d had that much patience you would never have turned to the Dark Side. So you take the quick and easy path and decide to just make it look like the thing’s glowing. Is there a way to do this by playing with finishes and color maps and transparency? None that’s immediately obvious. You’re going to have to put some effort in and learn how POV-ray handles its particle systems so your blade can be surrounded by an ominous red nimbus of death and potential severed limbs.
And then, just when you were on the point of trying to Force-choke the computer, victory! Not only are there tutorials aplenty on media effects in POV-ray, one of the effects is “emitting,” which looks like it’s giving off light but is really just adding its color to whatever rays pass through it! Stick it in a cylinder and you now have your very own glowing laser sword, and even if it won’t brighten up a dark room with its infernal light, at least it looks really cool. You just have to make sure and manipulate the lighting so as to conceal the fact that not only is it not really emitting light, the hazy part doesn’t even cast a shadow. In fact, make it so the whole blade doesn’t cast a shadow, since even that looks less silly than the clearly-defined shadow of a non-hazy, death-nimbus-free stick.
And now you’re done with your lightsaber and you need a scene to put it in. Well, you’ve got this far, why not model the rest of your desk? Someday your kids will grow up and want to know how you spent most of your time as a force of galaxy-wide terror, and then you’ll be able to show them the spiffy windows they’re building into the late-model Death Stars these days and your Evil Overlord of the Year souvenir mug. And then they’ll overthrow you and bring peace and justice to the galaxy. Life tends to throw you nasty surprises like that. But in the meantime, you can do a good deed for posterity and image-map the Imperial insignia onto your CSG-cylinders-and-torus mug. Don’t forget to make it a cylindrical map and adjust the scale, or those guys in the Imperial marketing and branding department will never forgive you for what you’ve done to their logo. If you’re really ambitious—and what Dark Lord isn’t?—find a nice image of your window overlooking the pitiless depths of space, and image-map it onto a gigantic hollowed-out sphere. Add a dark, reflective, and intimidatingly bare stretch of desk to put everything on, and it’ll start looking just like home.
As for some of the images to emerge from this exercise… well… if the Emperor ever asks, of course you’ll claim that levitating objects for fun is beneath the dignity of a Sith Lord, but he just doesn’t understand the day-to-day grind of galactic domination. Even Sith Lords get bored sometimes.