Online Portfolio of Michael Wach

During the spring semester of 2007, I took a class titled “3D Texturing & Maya” (DVA223) with instructor Arnaud Ehgner. The final project was to go out and take a picture of an interior and then recreate it as similar as possible in 3d. So my girlfriend at the time was into interior design and suggested that I take my camera to some model / display homes here in Arizona. We looked up some addresses on the internet and then set out for the adventure.

I believe the model home I chose to recreate in 3d was located far, far away from my school, somewhere in Mesa. We walked through a number of homes, some of them looked cool, some not so cool… Towards the end of the trip, I walked into the master bedroom of the home we were in. I was almost immediately certain that this room was going to be the one I render, and so it was. I took pictures of everything possible- different views of the bed, close-ups of the fabrics, walls, furniture, etc… These would make for a much better result than using procedural textures or somebody else’s off of the internet. I like to keep all of my work 100% original, and this way I had my own high resolution images ready to create textures out of.

I loaded the images into Photoshop one by one and created seamless textures for all of the walls and fabrics using the Offset Filter. For those of you that may be unfamiliar with this filter, it simply offsets your photo by whatever setting and wraps the remainder around to the opposite side of the canvas. This is a pretty standard procedure in the 3d world.

Unlike every other student in the class, I was using Blender 3D instead of Maya. I knew how to do the exact same thing in Maya, but preferred Blender because I a much more comfortable with the user interface and workflow. This project would also be a great demonstration of the power of Blender. All of the renders were exported via the internal plugin to YAFRay, what I think of as the equivalent to Maya’s MentalRay. Everything was modeled and rendered on a 2.6ghz intel core 2 duo machine with 512mb of ram and of course, linux. Draft renders took on average about 10 minutes to produce, and typically were way too noisy or distorted to use for anything. The final render took all night, I think about 10 - 12 hours to be more specific. This wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for, considering the finals week deadlines and the fact that I also needed to use my computer for other final projects at the time too…

Needless to say, I made it through the class successfully, the teacher loved the results and requested that I join him and a team of other animation students over the summer. I would have if there wasn’t so many other projects I was in demand for, and perhaps if I had a car at the time to attend the meetings with.