Section III: Potential Extra Credit - Art Competition: Model something Creative!

You can design your own polygon mesh using the free program Blender and save it as a COLLADA mesh file (.dae). For a baseline starting point, we recommend designing a humanoid mesh with a head, two arms, and two legs. We have created a video tutorial on Blender to guide you through the basics of making a simple humanoid mesh.

Once you have designed your mesh and saved it as a .dae file, you should load it into the meshedit program and subdivide it to smooth it out. The figure below shows the simple humanoid mesh before and after subdivisions, as well as with a shader of environment map reflection applied.

Here are a few other ways you can express your creativity:

• Add additional detail to your mesh - fingers, facial features.
• Google “box modeling” (images and videos) to get inspired.
• Investigate additional functionality in Blender to design alternative shapes.
• Programmatically generate a mesh that approximates a 3D fractal or other complex shape.
• Write a super cool custom shader that makes your mesh look awesome!
• Implement additional geometric operations and demonstrate them on your mesh.

For Your Art Competition Submission (Optional, Possible Extra Credit)

• You do not need to have your art ready at the time of submission. The Art Competition will open the following day after the Assignment 2 deadline.
• If submitting at the time of the homework submission, save your best polygon mesh as artcompetition.dae in your docs folder
• Show us a screenshot of the mesh when submitting your art in the competition Google Form.
• Include a series of screenshots showing your original mesh and your mesh after one and two rounds of subdivision. If you have used custom shaders, include screenshots of your mesh with those shaders applied as well.
• Describe what you have done to enhance your mesh beyond the simple humanoid mesh described in the tutorial.