The Magical Park

By Jacqueline Killenga and Mandy Korpusik

Computer Graphics, Spring 2012

The goal of our project was to create a realistic, but magical park scene with bright, colorful objects. We hoped to implement advanced Computer Graphics techniques, especially cool animation, as well as to challenge ourselves. Most of all, we looked forward to having fun!

Our project incorporates several important CG concepts: textures, material and lighting, camera position, curved surfaces, shadows, and animation. We used texture mapping for the grass, water, sky, and merry-go-round. The grass and water are actually Bezier surfaces with texture mapping. The sun and moon are directional lights, whereas the lamp is a spotlight. The merry-go-round, swings, water, lamp, and trees have specularity and shininess so that they seem more realistic and so that the sunlight's movement is more noticeable. We set up the camera ourselves in order to immerse the viewer inside the scene. There are various keyboard callbacks to control the animation, including 'g' for starting the animation, 'r' for resetting, '1' for updating one frame at a time, '+' for increasing the speed, and '-' for decreasing the speed. In addition, we used Photoshop to edit the images of the sky so that they lined up nicely with each other and with the floor of the scene. Finally, we added trees to the scene in order to obtain the effect of the sun and moon rising behind a tree and animated objects moving in front of or behind other objects.

This is an image of the lamppost we modeled using two cones, a tube, and a curved top composed of two adjoining Bezier surfaces. The lamp involves both material and lighting because the lamp light turns on at night, and the metal tube has some specularity.




This is the swing set we created, which was relatively easy to model, but challenging to animate because we were initially drawing the swings in such a way that the axis of rotation was at the seat instead of the top bar. We completely reordered how we drew each part of the swings in order to obtain the correct axis of rotation.




This is an image of the merry-go-round. We texture mapped a rainbow texture onto the circular portion. We also animated the merry-go-round by incrementing the angle of rotation. Additionally, the metallic bars have specularity and shininess.




This is an image of the slide, which involved a challenging Bezier surface of 8x3 control points.




This image contrasts the scene at 5am to the scene at noon. At 5am (image on the left), the scene is dark and the sun has not yet begun to rise. At noon (image on the right), the scene is very bright and has risen midway through the sky.





This image contrasts the scene at dusk to the scene at night. At dusk (image on the left), the sun is setting in the west. At nigh (image on the right)t, the scene is darker, the lamp is turned on, and the moon is beginning to rise in the east.

Below is an mpeg of the animation