![](bg3.png)
ELA
®
-Photo Series were scanned and additional
digital photos were made of components of the real
rooms. These images provide the basis for the
modeling of the entire house and the individual
rooms. The important parts of the pictures were
copied and used to texture the objects in Maya.
There are several methods for texturing an object,
but the simplest way is to assign a material to an
object. First of all, the type of material is chosen. In
this project, lambert material was used for the wall
material. This is a material (shader) that represents
lusterless or dull, mat surfaces (such as chalk,
sheenless paint, unpolished surfaces) without
mirroring qualities. For metal-like materials, blinn
material is used. It is a material (shader), that is
particularly effective at simulating metallic surfaces
(for example, brass or aluminum), which typically
give soft specular, i.e., mirroring , highlighting. It
must be stressed that Maya supports many types of
materials. With Maya it is even possible to design
one’s own material by adding special colors,
transparency, ambient color or incandescence. Maya
saves the configurations and these can be used for
other models.
In the process of modeling and texturing,
numerous objects were created, including walls,
windows, floors, doors, etc. It is very useful to use
layers in Maya, especially if the project consists of
many individual objects. The project is more
comprehensible, if the individual parts are
categorized. Working with layers makes it easier to
maintain an overview of the whole project. The
procedure is simply to add a new layer to the project,
and select the objects which belong to the same
category, and then add selected objects to the layer.
First, the layer must be named. When the modeling
and texturing part of the layer’s objects has been
completed, it can simply be hidden, if necessary.
Proper layers represent categories. In each
category there are objects which have their own
texture map or color, and which belong together.
The result of modeling and texturing is shown in
Figure 4, where the layers present the individual
parts of the house, such as the roof, the inside walls,
the furniture, etc.
2.3 Converting: An Advantage of
Software Independence
This project was developed in the programming
environment Eclipse (Eclipse), where the
programming language is C++. Use of the engine
Irrlicht (Irrlicht Engine) enables the user to walk
around in the Virtual House, click on several objects
Figure 4: The ELA®-House in Maya.
around in the Virtual House, click on several objects
and respond interactively. Irrlicht is a free open
source 3D engine. However, one problem involved
in using Irrlicht is that it does not support the Maya
binary files. It was a challenge to find a way to
export the model to a file type supported by Irrlicht.
Maya can export its models to object format, but this
format contains only geometry, and textures cannot
be saved in this format. The solution to this problem
was the program Right Hemisphere’s Deep
Exploration (Deep Exploration).
2.3.1 The Advantages of using Deep
Exploration
Deep Exploration supports almost all 3D or 2D file
types, including Maya’s scenes. When the program
runs, a scene, a file browser, and a little viewer
appears. It is possible to open a saved Maya file in
the scene field of Deep Exploration. Deep
Exploration is not merely a file converter. When the
file is loaded, the user is able to turn or fly around
the object, zoom in or zoom out, but it is not
possible to modify the object. Deep Exploration can
assign textures or colors to the objects, but this
operation and the possibilities are very far from
those which one is able to accomplish with Maya.
Once the scene is loaded, the software is ready to
export the result to all file types that Deep
Exploration supports. A very popular format is the
DirectX file format. The DirectX file format is an
architecture- and context-free file format. It is
template-driven and is free of any user-knowledge or
experience. The file format may be used by any
client application and currently is used by Direct3D
Retained Mode to describe geometry data, frame
hierarchies, and animations (DirectX). If the
exporting process is done correctly, the resulting file
is an .x file consisting of the whole geometry and
inside the file the paths of the texture files are also
DEVELOPMENT OF THE VIRTUAL ELA®-HOUSE
521