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The Caterpillar and the Horse
My First and Only Experience with 3D Modeling
These images are the fist I've produced using some 3-D modeling software, made by the Autodesk Corporation, called "Maya". I find that I feel a little hesitant to show them off, because they took little effort to create. Perhaps I wouldn't go that far. But it was a matter of hours, versus a matter of days or months (as in the case of a Flash animations). Also, one needs to take into account the learning curve -- if I were familiar with the Maya software, I could have cranked these out in five minutes. As it was, many of the aforementioned hours were spent hacking through the program interface.
The images might look impressive, especially to someone who's not familiar with 3-D software. But in a very strong sense I didn't make them. It all reminds me of a time in 10th grade when I showed a political cartoon I had drawn on my Mac to my Social Studies teacher. "Wow! A computer generated drawing!", he said. "I've never seen a computer generated drawing before! Neat, Matt!" Of course the implication was that it was the computer, and not I, who had "created" the image.
In that case, the notion was nonsense. I had drawn every pixel with a mouse, using it just like someone would a pen or pencil. But even so, there were patterns I had filled areas with, and tools I had used to create perfect circles, squares, or straight lines. At this point, don't we come close to attributing a painting to a paintbrush rather than the painter?
Let's ignore this slippery slope, and instead illustrate the existence of the "autonomous artist" on a continuum, with finger-painting on one end and Pokemon stickers, applied to the underside of a desk, on the other. I'm not sure where 3-D graphics generated in Maya fall. And yes, they really are "generated" -- based on a couple of light sources and some mathematical information on the placement of geometric planes, the computer is determining how these 3-dimensional shapes are going to appear to the eye.
I invented the creatures (mostly -- the wings on the horse were a "happy accident", as they say, resulting from pulling out a series of vertices out like strings of taffy), and I did use the software tools with whatever finesse was necessary to create boxes and balls of the right size, and then properly juxtapose these boxes and balls. So ultimately, it was not unlike painting: dextrous manipulation based on imagination and visual cues.
But "creating" these images was still trivial compared to painting a 36" x 54" oil painting or drawing a 5-minute Flash animation. It'll be interesting to see how the semester progresses.
I sketched 5 - 10 possible modeling subjects, and a caterpillar made of sequential spheres was the first of them. After playing with Maya and its simple polygons for a little while, it became apparent that the caterpillar, and the little wooden horse made of blocks which was my last sketch, would be the
easiest to make.
I made a caterpillar leg out of two elongated rectangular prisms, a small sphere, and a stretched-out cylinder, and attached it to a large sphere comprising an individual body segment. Then I duplicated the leg, rotated the duplicate 180 degrees, and pasted it onto the other side of the sphere/segment where the other leg should be. Finally, I grouped the segment-with-legs, and made sequential duplicates of it, rotating each a bit more than the last so as to give the caterpillar the appearance of having a curved body. My caterpillar's head is a squashed sphere, its antennae are elongated cylinders, and its eyes are short cylinders with
a small squashed sphere in the center.
The horse is made of two blocks: one for the head, and one for the body. Its legs and neck are cylinders, as are its eyes (very short cylinders). Its ears are made of trapezoidal prisms with a cylinder-half bonded to the wide top. The weird "wings" came to be when I made a cross-hatch geometry out of the top of the horse's body, and then pressed the "extrude" button over and over.
The ground is a flat plane that was divided into smaller rectangles, and then the vertices of the cross-hatching were either pulled up or pushed down for a "rough ground" look.
Perhaps it would have been fun to extend the caterpillar's body by 10, 20, 30, etc, more segments, and then have it curl around in odd patterns on the surface. The little horsey sometimes wishes that his extruded corners didn't curl up into his extruded edges, but what can you do?