This assignment teaches about creating complicated models and incorporating them into a virtual world. The virtual cube world from last week has become a museum this week. The main attraction is a skeleton of a human foot. There is speculation that the Tar-Heel footprint is modeled after this particular foot (now a skeleton). Admission to the museum is 5 bucks.

Cube World


Tar-Heel foot (obj model from Game Tutorials)

The skeleton foot is a careful computer reconstruction. The reconstruction is recreated in the VR-Juggler development environment. Incorporating the foot requires rendering it in openGL. Before rendering, the foot has to be loaded into VR-Juggler, in this case, from an obj file (Alias|Waveform standard).  The loader code is sample code from “Game Tutorial’s” (OBJ File Loader) web site. Obj files do not store texture mapping so that is handled separately. 

One texture map has to be applied to the entire model of the skeleton. The texture map is of a surface that looks like bone. The bone texture map and code for texture mapping was also provided with the obj file loader example. The sample code, however, used the Glaux library to load the bitmaps for the texture map. The Glaux library seems to be incompatible with VR-Juggler. So instead the GLaux code is replaced by texture loading from the texture mapping tutorial (not using Glaux). That worked well.
 

The original goal of the assignment is to explore modeling tools. In the last week I have learnt about the modeling tools and different conversion processes to incorporate the models into our openGL applications. The modeling tools available in the department are also commercially very successful tools.
 

• 3D Studio Max: I played around with creating some shapes. There is a steep learning curve to become familiar with the modeling paradigm. I also watched Thorsten and Eric model and apply texture mapping. Amazing what they can do.
• Maya: There were some problems with getting it installed. 
• VRML models can incorporate shapes and texture mapping. A sample from my undergrad.

Once the model exists, it needs to be converted in to a format that is compatible with the application (ie. there is code to load the model). 
 

• OBJ files : Alias| Wavefront format. Texture maps are not included. Although I had source code to load objs, the foot model was the only model I could successfully load. I tried several other ones.
• 3ds: 3D studio Max’s format. Eric showed me the Depression (something like that) program that converts to different format. 
• Opengl: One conversion is to the openGL commands. Everything is hardcoded in the program!
• OpenSG (Scene Graph): Is created by some programs. VR-Juggler is supposed to load openSG.

Thanks to Jason Jearld for setting up VR-Juggler, this project could have been a much more complicated