The Cedars 24 second movie - 160x120 - hut1.avi - [2.1Mb]

• This was modeled over Christmas of 1995 as a test. My goal here was to create a building that would be set in an adventure game world. The premise is that this clinic, nestled in the heart of the Fenn Valley, lies untouched by war or conflict due to the great respect for the Fenn Mages, the healers. The valley, once covered in cedar trees, now stands denuded as wood was taken for fires or construction. These scant few remain, surrounding the adobe huts hand-packed by the master builders centuries ago.
  
• I started with an onion shape and lathed it. Each of these huts has a smoke-hole at the top. The smaller building has a wooden rim on the chimney, while the other one slopes upward to provide a more natural chimney. The wooden doorway has a rune at the top which was stenciled in and extruded inward.
  
• I designed the sign to be surface morphable. I designed the letters both in English and in runes. In the .AVI, as the camera approaches the sign, it morphs from runish to English. This is a magical sign which is readable by whoever approaches, no matter what their native language is.
  
• The cedars are roughly drawn and lathed. I designed two layers, each of which is transparency-mapped using fractal noise, to reveal what appears to be multiple layers of a cedar tree. To make a real cedar tree with all the leaves, etc, would be a much larger challenge, and this project was done under extreme time-pressure. It was an audition of sorts for a job as a 3D modeler/animator for a game company. (I didn't get the job, and the project was cancelled not long after that.)
  
• The landscape was drawn in CorelDraw (as usual) and altered in Corel Photo Paint. I used it as a displacement map on a large flat rectangle that was subdivided plenty of times.
  

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