APPLICATIONS
OF
Where is 3D applied in everyday life?
3D is used in a multitude of areas that most people dont even realise. Although most common in TV & Film, it also appears in the world of education.
TV & FILM: In the way of TV and film, 3D is
mostly used to create large effects such as the fight scenes and robots from Tranformers or to create stunning enviroments and lifelike characters of Avatar.
Video Games: In a 3D game, Almost everything
is a 3D model. This can be as simple as a box on a ground to as complex as a the environment the characters in the game live in.
Engineering: 3D models are used to create proto-
Animation: When it comes to 3D animation, the
piece always appears cartoon-like as if everything were to be 100% realistic, the render times would be massive. For Toy Story 3, for example, a single frame took 7 hours to render, with 24 frames being displayed a second in the film. Taking into account the whole film, the render time would have been 117 years. For this Pixar used a technique called distributed rendering which I will go into detail with later.
Education: 3D Modells allow teachers to go into de-
tail and show students each and every part of an organ that a text book would not be able to show or something that is too expensive for use in a class room.
types and parts that can be created using 3D printers. this is more precise than doing it manually as lasers and mechanics are way more stable than the human hand.
Architecture: In architectural design, the producer
Product Design: This involves tge desubgers of a
product gathering and suggesting designs that would suit the intended audience of the product. Eventually, designers will start to create the prodcut, several designers may be working on the same project or several designers will be creating several completely seperate product to save time.
must be accurate with his development, and also has to take in consideration of the laws of physics. If the user could create a building with a sloped roof, the designer would have to show how the roof conforms to real life by showing in the program that it wouldn’t fall or break off.
Geometric Theory 3D models are made up of smaller shapes know as polygons. These polygons contain vertexes. The polygons are mostly triangles that can be manipulated by the vertexes to make larger and complex shapes. The amount of polygons a shape has will determine the speed at which the model will render at. There is a constraint of how many polygons can be rendered per second.
Mesh Construction Box modelling is when the user starts out with a cube and then mnipulates the object to turn it into the model or shpae that they desire. This method is quick and easy to learn but it is not easy to add a lot of immense detail. Sculpting is the practice in which the user starts out with a sphere and manipulates it by pulling and pushing around the vertexes of the shape and creating subdivision layers. Extrusion modelling is a lot like box modelling with the exception that the user starts out with a line instead of a cube. Although this method is a lot quicker than box modelling, it is hardee to create curves without the large amount of polygons that box modelling supplies.
3D Development Software
Blender is an open source program which is good for ameteurs who are wanting to get into animation and modelling. The easy to use interfaces and the reason that it is free allow anyone to upload a tutorial on how to use the software, so if someone needed to learn something, there would be many tutorials to help them. Autodesk Maya is a professionl modelling software that is commonly used for making models and animations for video games. Most users prefer to build a base model and improve it within the same software. Cinema 4D is a proffessional software used for various things, ranging from architecture to engineeering.
Constraints Over the past few years, technology has advanced to give us more processing power meaning faster load times, giving us improved video game graphics. Polygons are rendered in real time meaning the higher the processing power, quicker the load time, however there are stil limits. Polycounts need to be kept fairly low as to avoid low frame rates as well as taking other processes and background applications into consideration. There is a restriction of how many polys can be rendured per second, this is divided by the frams per second the game runs at. While most games were previously 30 FPS, a lot of games now a days aim for 60 FPS. Fine detailing models will largley affect render times. If there is a deadline on an animated film and it takes too long to render, they could easily miss the deadline. Video games are not affected by this as eveything in a game is rendered in real time, when it is needed. 3D Modelers are commonly free lance workers and the best person to hire may end up living half way accross the globe bringing up yet another problem - Internet speeds. Polys increase the size of a file that a 3D model fills. Whole scenes would be sent with multiple objects with those objects being made from thousands of polys or more depending on what the scene is used for.
Displaying 3D Polygon Animations There are 3 ways to display 3D Polygon Animations: Rasterisation Raytracing Radiosity
Rasterisation: This is method is mainly used for real time applications such as video games as it is rendered in real time. It is used to display and render a certain place rather than the whole scene. It renders only what you will see and changes what is rendered accodingly.
Raytracing: This technique renderes out an image by casting out rays of light onto the scene and the objects in it. As the rays bounce around the scene, a very realistic image is rendered out, however this method of render is very time costly but is best for rendering certain matierals such as glass for reflection and water for refraction
Radiosity: This is a technique that uses two types of lights to create the scene. One light(incident light) hits an object whilst the other light(reflective) reflects off the objects surface. This is mainly used for interior design.