Alamo 2.0

Doorway

dotupdate — Tue, 31 May 2011 17:28:17 +0000

And here is a render (Blender) of a pristine (more or less) doorway to the Alamo church. The design detail is all bump mapping except for the stone above the arch which uses displacement for and bump mapping.

Doorway Render

Niches

dotupdate — Thu, 26 May 2011 16:20:19 +0000

I just completed the modeling of the four niches on the front of the Alamo. I decided to use bump mapping instead of displacement on the details on the faces. The render below is of a ‘pristine’ niche without proper materials and weathering.

Lower niche (pristine, no materials) Blender render

Animation test

dotupdate — Sat, 14 May 2011 22:01:35 +0000

I made a brief animation using the Thea render.

Modeling the columns of the Alamo facade

dotupdate — Mon, 02 May 2011 03:11:34 +0000

One of the biggest improvements to my Alamo model can be made by increasing the complexity of geometry for the objects. The first model used a relatively small number of polygons for each object. Detail was added by using textures. Unfortunately, the detail and mapping of the textures was not that great either due to my skill level at the time.

So, I am going back through my model and increasing the basic detail of the geometry before applying textures. This includes using subdivision techniques and displacement that greatly increases the realism of the mesh.

A first example of this work is the modeling of the four columns on the facade of the Alamo. The picture below shows a first result. The column on the left is from the old model–crude geometry and poor textures. The column on the right is the new detailed model. It looks pretty good even without textures. At this point, the column is “pristine” and needs to be modified to show aging, dirt and damage.

Comparison of old and new model of columns

Blender to XAML

dotupdate — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 21:54:07 +0000

Before getting back to my model, I took a diversion through another quick project.

My interest in 3D graphics was sparked through some programming work I was doing a few years back with C# and .Net. Microsoft introduced a new method of programming UIs with a markup language called XAML in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). Through this language, you can control all elements on the screen. One API set allows the display of 3D objects where the objects are completely described in this text language. I became interested in tools that could be used to generate 3D which led me to trueSpace and eventually Blender.

In 2008, an add-on to Blender became available which could translate Blender objects to XAML code. I never used it because I did not need to produce 3D for Windows applications. A new version of Silverlight will be released this year which will support 3D in the browser using XAML. Using this technology, it would be possible to show a rotating 3D picture of the Alamo when you mouse-over its map position in my Alamo App or even build a walk through application.

The original add-on does not work in the latest versions of Blender (2.5x) as the Blender API has changed as well as the version of the language that it was written in (Python). So as a fun exercise, I did a port of the old add-on to the new version of Blender in about 8 days.

The code can be found on Codeplex in the patches section at this link.

13 Days: The Siege and Battle of the Alamo

dotupdate — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 13:55:31 +0000

I have not been able to work on my model very much at all the past 6 months because I have been involved in creating a web-based application that illustrates the events around the Alamo during the 13 day siege. For each day of the siege an animated and interactive map is displayed that shows the evolving tactical situation for the Texian and Mexican forces. The app uses the Microsoft Silverlight platform and runs on popular browsers on PCs and Macs.

Here is a link to the most current version: 13 Days: The Siege and Battle of the Alamo

I had the pleasure of demonstrating the app at the Alamo during the 175th anniversary of the battle.

I was able to get some great photos of the walls of the Alamo and Long Barrack that I hope can be used for improved textures in my model.

New render engine in workflow

dotupdate — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 20:52:27 +0000

After much study, I purchased a license to the Thea render engine. A simple comparison can be found on the tools>renderer>discussion page.

Now lighting and rendering should not be an issue with obtaining near photo real results. Rather, the limitation will be on modeling and material details. Thea has an excellent material management system and a growing library of ready-to-use materials that I can use directly or learn from.

Model ported to game engine

dotupdate — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 02:02:04 +0000

Today, I did a quick port of a portion of the model into the Unity Game Engine. This was a learning exercise to understand the complete flow and to see what changes in the model/materials I would need to make in order to have a polished visualization. The two big items are 1. to account for the fact that the renderer does not deal with two sided meshes and that the complex textures that I have been using need to be baked into simpler UV mapped images. I did not explore baking of shadows or normals which would be necessary for a quality result.

Here is the link to the web app of this first attempt: http://home.comcast.net/~boddie/SFWeb.html

Use the mouse to look around and the arrow keys (or WASD) to move.

Continuing to texture

dotupdate — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 14:51:14 +0000

I am continuing the work of placing and texturing the buildings in Bexar.

Since the last post, I have also worked on a workflow to create a better height map of the area around Bexar. It involves downloading the elevation data from the USGS and converting it to a 16-bit tiff that can be edited in photoshop to remove noise and correct for modern day alterations to the terrain.

I also experimented with Unity. I have a small demo program in which I can ‘walk around’ the Alamo compound.

Some feedback on the San Fernando photo indicated that the walls are too gray. Here is a rendering with a warmer hue:

San Fernando Church 1836

Another slight improvement

dotupdate — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 04:07:30 +0000

I reversed the clouds to match the sun direction that was used in the render. I also reduced the saturation on both the background and foreground images and added a small Gaussian blur in an attempt to get closer to photo-real.