The Reaper Rollercoaster

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¨ Creative Process

The first step was selecting an idea that would both be interesting and challenging. We also wanted the project to be unique and original compared to previous cosc 3p98 projects. The rollercoaster was our first choice since during the summer of 2004 one partner had visited Canada's Wonderland and Six Flags Darien Lake. Drawing on that experience was a major influence on selecting the rollercoaster as our project. We also examined previous year’s projects that were close to what we wanted to accomplish.

¨ Program

The next step after picking the idea for the project was the selection of the modeling software. In this case, we limited our search to the software directly mention in class and that was also available in the labs. After examining poser, Bryce and other design systems, we selected Bryce to be our main software. However, later on in the project we did use poser to create some basic models of people for our rollercoaster. The reason for selecting Bryce was simply because of the power of rendering realistic landscapes and sky models. However, by selecting a rollercoaster we were unfortunately limiting ourselves with respect to modeling the rollercoaster with unique objects. Since Bryce is mainly designed for landscapes it lacked some of the larger design tools that poser or 3d studio max had, however we were able to overcome this problem with some unique graphical design.

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¨ Initial Design

After selecting the idea and the program, our team had to research the various components to a rollercoaster. We first studied the major theme parks in Canada and in the United States. First we visited the Canada's Wonderland Park Website , specifically we examined the theme park map and how the artists interpret the design of the roller coasters from a far away view. We knew for our opening scene we wanted an overview of the park. This would give the user a sense of how huge the mammoth structure of the rollercoaster is. This also presented us with the question of the type of rollercoaster we wanted to designed and animate. We could have selected the basic old fashion wooden rollercoaster or the 'newer' metal type rollercoaster. After visiting several more website including Cedar Point ThemePark and some fan websites we selected a more modern type rollercoaster, however this type of rollercoaster does have some attributes similar to a wooden structured rollercoaster.

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¨ Designing Tasks

After the initial research our team decided to break the task up into two tasks or components. Michael Piskuric would focus on scenery of the park, movement of the camera along the track and importing sounds effects. Michael Sawyer focused mainly on research/designing the layout of the track and implementing a track for Bryce.

¨ Michael Piskuric

Michael Piskuric's job mainly focused what type of scenery the park would implement. He had the opportunity to experiment on what type of sky and environment he wanted to implement. He went through several revisions of how the scenery would look and feel. Michael also had the difficult task of rendering the track in animation. Basically, Michael's job was to move the camera along the track to give it the appearance of cart moving along the track. Unfortunately, Bryce had a huge problem rendering the scene properly due the large complexity of the track. At points even rendering a picture on the track became a difficult task, resulting in several minutes of waiting Unfortunately, Michael's machines were the only one's that could properly render the scenes since we were using Bryce 5 (Bryce 4 was in the labs) and the other partner's machine was only a p3 500mhz compared to 3.0 GHz of Michael Piskuric's machine. Unfortunately, due to the huge scale of the project 60,000 polygons to be render made the process long and difficult. Also making the camera movements flow was extremely difficult since Bryce animation doesn't play well with large animation scenes with detailed polygons. Furthermore, having a track makes the camera movement defined but also means that the camera has to be realistic to what the average viewer would want to see. For instance if the camera moved too far to the left or right the camera would

Michael Piskuric added sounds via Microsoft Movie Maker, sounds for the roller coaster was taken from http://www.wavsource.com/sfx/sfx2.htm and was modify to suit our needs. All other objects are built into bryce.

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¨ Michael Sawyer

Michael Sawyer's job was to focus on the design and implementation of the track. Michael drew mainly of his experience over the summer of visiting several theme parks. After researching on the internet various tracks designs he implemented a more modern approach to the coaster. First he started off, by drawing by hand the general layout of the track and then specific moved on to drawing individual pieces of the track. The track itself could be broken into 4 parts: The actual rails for the cart to move along, the main support rail, the horizontal support beams and vertical supports. The first step was to draw each piece individually on paper and then combing them and then drawing them based on various perspectives (eyelevel, from the top, below, and on several angled views). Next came rendering the track in Bryce, which proved more difficult then expected. Using cylinders for the rails, the main support rail, and the vertical support was a forgone conclusion however to design a realistic horizontal support was more difficult. As from the screen shots you can see that he went through several versions of support types before landing on the rectangular support structure.

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¨ Rejected Track Support

¨ Track Support with basic track

After selecting the support track the next major step was merging the various pieces together effectively. As you can see from the above picture the track looks very realistic in fact the support structure came out looking exactly as Michael wanted. The next major problem was rendering a slope piece of track for hills. To create a realistic upward slope, Michael had to create several small cylinders and then rotate them by a small y axis degree. This gave the track the effect of sloping, however too much of an angle the track would appear distorted and choppy, not enough and the hill would appear to be unnatural. As it turns out a small y axis increase of 1 or 2 degrees help create the desired effect. Once bending the one rail, the effect can easily be duplicated for the other rails and the support structure moved to accommodate the slope.

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After producing the initial slope, the next step was to reproduce the slope to give a gigantic hill for the coaster. The actual hill is at least 4 to 5 planes (Bryce planes) large. This gives a mammoth size quality to the slope and to the animation. To achieve this effect Michael simply reproduces the track according to the specific slope needed. This created the problem of how to combine the tracks together to form one gigantic slope. This was the most challenging aspect of the project to make sure that the tracks merged properly and that the track flowed properly from one section to another. To achieve Michael used several small cylinders to remove small glitches and also zoomed in to the track and used spray brush render to make sure the tracks were connected properly and aligned so that no one could tell the difference. As the slope approached the tope there was the need to transform the slope into a gently plateau before the drop. The top curve presented the same type of challenge as the bottom part of the slope, how to create a realistic top hill without making it look too "broken" or choppy. To achieve the curve he simply reversed the slope of the y axis by a small degree for several small cylinders to create the effect.

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The next major section of track was the loop, which required Michael not only to loop the track but also to invert the track from running on the outside to being on the inside instead of the outside. The loop was the most challenging because its support structure was different from the other track pieces and also it was sloping but also curving to the right to avoid the other section of the track.

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http://www.canadas-wonderland.com/

Again to render an effect loop Michael used small cylinders to create the loop and also used a small x axis value to curve the track to avoid the previous section of track. The next section of track was the curve that would turn the user around for the next section of track. Again to complete this effect Michael used cylinders and changed the degree of the angle to make it appear as if the track was curving naturally. In addition at the centre of the turn he included a loop to give it a more realistic feel and to make it more exciting for the average rider.

¨ Final product:

Enjoy the ride!!!.

References:

http://www.cedarpoint.com/

http://www.wavsource.com/sfx/sfx2.htm

http://www.petersharpe.com/Tutorials.htm

http://www.coasterimage.com/hersheypark/hpcoast.htm

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