Nott Memorial Rendering

This is a movie I created of the Nott Memorial located at Union College in Schenectady, NY. My goal is to recreate the structure as it appeared in the late 19th century. Since the Nott was heavily renovated in the late 20th century, the interior of my model does not exactly match what is there today, but it is close.

I modeled the structure in 3ds Max, and with a fairly nice digital camera, I went around the Nott taking snapshots of its various features. I then cropped and heavily modified the pictures that I took to make the texture maps that would map the final model. Also, you may notice the structure has a fairly ridged look to it, that was because I originally modeled the geometry with a low enough polygon count so that I could use it in an interactive environment, such as a game, however, I have not decided on a platform for that task.

The Bust inside the building was originally made by scanning a plastic reproduction of a bust using a Cyberware 3D head and face scanner. Unfortunately, the geometry generated for the scan was very difficult to work with, so I rebuilt the model myself in Max and reused the original texture map from the original scan after I heavily modified it. The lip-syncing was done solely by hand even before I had the audio file.

I rendered this movie on a 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4 machine at Union, which I would VPN into through Remote Desktop from over 1,000 miles away, and upload the project file for the scene. I was really surprised by how well this worked out, and it really sped up the whole process.

The animation starts with a camera fly-through that goes through the doors and circles a bust at the center of the building, from which the hand-animated lip-synced bust says his line. The voice was generated with a text-to-speech system from Festival Speech Synthesis.