This week Marie and I are preparing for the Chicago Women and Computing Conference that is to take place on October 25-26th. We are going to do a Lightning Round presentation covering what we are currently working on this year. We were able to put together a presentation for it and presented for one of Dr. Wolfe’s classes on Tuesday.
Dr. Wolfe, Marie and I met again this Friday. We went over the finishing touches of our presentation, adding a few additional slides to the powerpoint, and Dr. Wolfe gave us tips on how to best prepare. We will present again on Tuesday for one of Dr. McDonald’s classes, and we will run through it again this coming Friday for Dr. Wolfe. Hopefully by that Saturday we will be prepared.
Another thing we talked about on our Friday meeting was our remaining goals for Paula. As previously mentioned, we identified key components of Paula’s model that have an excessively high number of polygons thanks to the script Marie wrote. As it stands, there are about 67,000 polys in the entire model. Of that 67,000, about 45, 320 are distributed through the lashes, teeth and tongue, sweater/pants, face, hands, feet and hair. The teeth and tongue hold about 8900, the hair about 8000 and the lashes are about a whopping 17,000! This is something that needs to be addressed.
To help us track our progress, Dr. Wolfe has provided us with a script that tracks how long it takes to render out an animation. Marie and I will both perform tests to track how our editing of the model’s geometry affects the rendering speed. Starting off, in the initial tests we will render out about 50 frames of Paula as she currently is. We will keep track of the time, the date and which machine the test was performed on. From there, we will begin to make modifications on Paula. Once we have remodeled or edited those key areas previously mentioned, we re-render and take note of the differences in render times.
When beginning these changes, we will tackle each aspect one by one. Marie has already started making modifications to the hair mesh using the ProOptimizer. The results aren’t exactly perfect so further work will be done to come to a suitable solution.
I will begin tackling the lashes.

As you can see, each lash is made using a line that is rendered out as a tube/cylinder. Up close, it is not very attractive looking either.
I plan to tackle this by creating a plane that conforms to the general shape of the lashes. Then I will make and apply an opacity map to it and hope that this will provide a suitable solution for a good looking pair and low poly count set of lashes.
I am still finishing up with midterms and concentrating on the ChiWIC Conference. I will begin work on this as time allows and will hopefully make progress within the next 2 weeks or so.