Jeremy Bain - Geographic Animation Specialist

Experience:

I was a member of the Rogers EAST lab for my junior and senior year. I worked almost exclusively in Microstation J and later Microstation V8. I first started by creating the 1998 BEST robot that was designed and built by Rogers students. I have never done a Microstation tutorial or been to a class on Microstation. After completing the robot, I went on to making a castle. It eventually became extremely complex as I learned many of the different options for creating objects, texturing, lighting, and animating. I then did an animation of one of the buildings in our high school in preparation for doing an animation of the new high school that was being built. During my senior year I began working with Justin Reh, also a member of the 2002 CRATE project. I started on completing the largest high school in the state in a complete, accurate 3D model. This involved making numerous different staircases, doors, railings, ext. Justin Reh focused primarily on these while I managed the massive file of nearly 300,000 objects. I worked on incorporating the new objects and placing them precisely. I also did the textures, lighting and animating.

Beginning with CRATE:

I applied and was hired to work with CRATE even though I had no prior experience in either program I was to use. Justin and I came in for several days before the project began and started doing tutorials. I focused on World Construction Set. It is a much less widely used program than SoftImage and only one simple tutorial existed for the program that only gave a hint at its potential. On the first day of the project, I started using Visual Nature Studio, which is an upgrade of World Construction Set. The first few weeks were very frustrating as I tried to learn the literally hundreds of components that effect simple things such as water. Another major problem was getting the data into VNS. Tim Mulvihill, an archeologist working at Parkin, had extremely accurate terrain data of the park but it was in a format that was hard to transfer. Using a few of the Global Information Specialist at CAST, we were finally able to use this data.

Creating a historical outdoor animation:

After numerous talks with Tim Mulvihill and George Sabo, an archeologist at the University of Arkansas Archeological Survey, I made a list of the changes to the topography and environment to make it more historically accurate. An entire section of the river had to be deleted and the land raised because it was an diversion created in the early 1900’s. The water level subsequently had to be raised to reflect this change. The moat had to be “re-dug” because erosion had made it only a low point in the terrain and it was higher than the river level. The mound itself at Parkin was raised to reflect erosion. The data was so precise that it was visible several areas where excavation had occurred and pottery found. Those also had to be filled in. All of these terrain changes were made by using terrafactors and then burned to the terrain to make new terrain files. Several 3D objects were needed. They were made in EAST software 3D Studio Max and Microstation. A plug-in was downloaded to allow files exchanges from Microstation to 3D Studio Max and then finally to VNS. The objects were then textured using Photoshop to edit pictures. The cornfields had to be created based on 15th century Indian farming. The size of the corn was about half what it is today and is much less dense. There were significantly less trees than there currently are do to the village itself and the farmland. The particular types of trees from the area was researched and applied. The density, height, and other settings for the trees had to be customized. The water color and appearance was heavily edited. The clouds were created and redone numerous times to add realism. The lighting had to be set with knowledge of the areas position on earth and the time of year.