Aaron Scott White - Artifacts Engineer

*Aaron also created two short movies, the first is of the bow and quiver and the second is a recreation of a pottery shard from Parkin laid on a wire frame of what was thought it looked like in tack.

Experience:

I was apart of the G.F.H.S. T.I.G.E.R. Lab for two years.  I have been working with SoftImage for a good part of those two years.  I started out on the tutorials and then went to doing things on my own to get familiar with the SoftImage 3D software.  Earlier this year, I went to the SoftImage/EAST training at the OUR co-op in Harrison.  Tim Horn taught it.  Most of the things I have done of SoftImage before doing this project was to get familiar with the software.  I did things like temples, taking things from the library and changing it and making a good screen saver with them. 

Getting started with the project:

The things that we did when we got started were to get the actual project data and see what we could do with the data.  It was decided upon that we would do a guard waking up and looking through the house and getting ready.  When we got the actual software it was the newer and different version of SoftImage  SoftImage XSI was different from the other, but I did do work on the demo version at the T.I.G.E.R. Lab for one day.  I also went to an E.A.S.T. conference class.  That class gave you some ideas of what the program could do.  I still didn’t have a good grasp of the little things that I could do in SoftImage 3D.  It took part of the day to get a feel for it and get started with the project.

My part of the project:

I was given the job of recreating the pottery, weapons and other items that would be found in the home.  I started by doing a bit of studying of books and pictures of what the things would look like.  After getting a grasp on what things looked like, I then thought of the easiest and best way of creating the pieces. 

Creating the pottery:

The primitives seemed like the natural place to start.  So I got a sphere, the closest thing to the shape of the pots.  I then began messing with the settings to get the opening in the top.  Then, to get the level bottom I used the tag mode to grab a few points and move them to level.  Looking inside however I noticed that the pot looked very thin.  To fix the problem, I added another primitive, a torus.  The torus is a tire looking shape (1^st image).  I added that to the top fixing it to where it looked right.  The other pots were done a little differently.  To do those, all I did differently was make the full sphere then extend the top polygons to add the bottleneck.  The head pots were something done but not needed in the actual home.  Taking a primitive head from the library and merging it with the regular pots that I had created made the head pots (2^nd image).  Then it was a matter of making it look right.

Creating the weapons:Taking a cylinder, then making it the appropriate length and width created the harpoon (3^rd image).  Then I had to take the points and scale and translate them to the right position to create the point and the barbs.  After drawing the outline, I used the revolution program to create the spear (4^th image).  I then used the scaling command and made it look flatter on one side and then made the proportions look like a spear’s would.  Taking a cylinder and combining it with a torus created the quiver (5^th image).  Taking a cylinder and adding the disc to make the feather on the sides created the arrows.  If you look at the end of the arrows there is an arrowhead.  I created that by revolution and merging it with the cylinder.  I created the bow by taking a torus and putting a lattice on it and making the shape (6^th image).  Then, I used a part of a sphere to create the string. 

Creating the other items:
I created the tables by taking a cube and adding subdivisions to it, then extending the four corner polygons out (7^th image).  The rug was a scaled cube with a texture on it.