A long time ago in a computer lab far away, my friends Brian and John and I sat down to create our first 3D graphics experiment. The ultimate goal of the project was to create a 3D environment that we could walk though using a Silicon Graphics Onyx equipped with a Boom Virtual Reality device. I began the project using Caligari TrueSpace 2 (on a Pentium) to design the building, furniture, lighting. We also used Adobe Photoshop to create some of the textures. We then exported the objects to AutoCad 13 (on a Sun Sparc 20) to polish up the wireframes. Next we opened the AutoCad .DXF file using Open Inventor running on a somewhat dated SGI Indigo. This program allowed to create a file readable by the Onyx so that we could take our Virtual walk through our building, which was quite impressive. The final transition to VRML was accomplished simply by modifying the Open Inventor source file. Unfortunately, in the translation process, the textures and original lighting specs were lost, so the building does not look nearly as good as it used to, but it is nonetheless cool. If you have a VRML viewer installed on your browser, click here to see our building in 3D space!
This is a raytraced image of our building created using TrueSpace with the original textures and lighting intact.