The Javelin Technologies Blog

If you like my previous post about a rendered cruise boat video, you should see this one too.

Javelin office just moved to a new location earlier this year, so I decided to make something interesting about the new office building.  Please take a look at the video below.

Here are some rendered images of the animation:

Fig. 1 - Light off

Fig. 2 - Light on

Fig. 3 - Book opening

Fig. 4 - Book open

A few topics that I would like to discuss about the model setup:

1. The pages in the book – only the top few pages are individual components.  The rest of them are one body with texture.  This keeps my assembly simple.

Fig. 5 - Pages setup

2. Angular mate between pages – I used “limit mate” for the pages.  The trick here is to make sure the range of motion is below 180 degrees.  Why? If  >180 degrees is allowed, funky things will happen to the popup sections because: for example 181 degrees is also -179 degrees.

Fig. 6 - Angle mate setup

3.  Appearances on the popup section – I used textures, or texture + decals.  For the mountain, I grabbed a photo of mountain from internet, and I added the paper texture.  The final appearance can only be seen in the final render images I posted at the beginning.

4. Popup section models – They are all surface models.  If I start to give them some thickness and make them solids, it is more difficult to apply mates for them.

5. Lighting – I added a “point” light inside the desk lamp.  The cover of the lamp is semi transparent, which allows the light to shine through.  In the point light property setup, I enabled “fog” which provides more artistic looks.  The fog appearance only shows up in the final render.

Fig. 7 - Lighting and fog setup