Core 7 - Brandon Eastin - Digital Media Designer

Education

Campus Topographic Map
	Client: School Project A small group of us volunteered for a special assignment. The challenge was to take a topographic CAD file (far left) of the college campus and make it into a 3D landscape that could be used for virtual tours. We decided the easiest way to create the model while preserving as much detail as possible was to make a displacement map. Cinema 4D would raise a plane according to what shade of gray that part of the image was (see below). Sounds easy, but it was a great exercise in problem solving and team coordination. We couldn't just paint bucket or live paint it because Illustrator opened the CAD file as a billion little line segments. We found a plug-in online that fixed the problem. Because the CAD file was so huge we split it up into fourths with a master copy so we could put it back together perfectly.
	The grayscale image was created by each of us working on our own quarter so it was important that we all were painting bucketing the same. We made a legend, a printed copy that was about 3'x7', and a swatches palette. I was in charge of putting the pieces back together since I knew how I took them apart. Then once in Cinema 4D it was just a matter of calculating the dimensions of the displacement and tweaking the smoothness. So the next class will have the opportunity to build upon our foundation.

Campus Topographic Map

Client: School Project

A small group of us volunteered for a special assignment. The challenge was to take a topographic CAD file (far left) of the college campus and make it into a 3D landscape that could be used for virtual tours. We decided the easiest way to create the model while preserving as much detail as possible was to make a displacement map. Cinema 4D would raise a plane according to what shade of gray that part of the image was (see below).

Sounds easy, but it was a great exercise in problem solving and team coordination. We couldn't just paint bucket or live paint it because Illustrator opened the CAD file as a billion little line segments. We found a plug-in online that fixed the problem. Because the CAD file was so huge we split it up into fourths with a master copy so we could put it back together perfectly.

The grayscale image was created by each of us working on our own quarter so it was important that we all were painting bucketing the same. We made a legend, a printed copy that was about 3'x7', and a swatches palette. I was in charge of putting the pieces back together since I knew how I took them apart. Then once in Cinema 4D it was just a matter of calculating the dimensions of the displacement and tweaking the smoothness. So the next class will have the opportunity to build upon our foundation.