The process I went through to create this model was quite lengthy. The first step, however, of getting the floor plans of the engineering area was obtained from Gary Houghton (much thanks!). Without these plans, it would have been far more difficult to model the lab accurately.

Looking at the plan of the lab, I found the first most immediate problem would be in modelling the glass arches at the end of the lab. I knew little of VRML at this point but I was aware of its limitations. Unlike AutoCAD or other solid modellers, VRML has the cylinder primitives but there is no such thing as a set difference operation in VRML. Thus, I began to look for helper applications.

My first thought was that I could easily model this in AutoCAD. Sure enough, I was quickly able to build an unpopulated model of the Pit and exported this to a DXF file. As you will probably find from any number of net searches, there are numerous DXF to VRML conversion tools out there. Some commerical, others not. Of the ones that were not commercial, I was unable to find a utility that was able to correctly interpret the DXF file, nevermind interpreting correctly into VRML.

Finally, I gave up on this idea and decided to try some VRML builders. One such program was the Virtual Home Space Builder (VHSB), but this program was limited to straight, orthogonal walls. Other programs proved to be equally useless for my needs.

At a loss for any external solutions, I decided that a perfect cylinder would not be possible and after studying a number of existing VRML worlds, determined that most designers used an IndexedFaceSet, and approximated curved surfaces with a number of polygons and then giving the illusion of smoothness by adjusting the lighting calculations performed on the object.

Using this technique, I proceeded to model the general structure of the Pit. I continued this process by creating discrete objects to be placed in the Pit.

These objects were used to populate the Pit and could be rearranged in VRML for different configurations of the furniture.

introduction

procedure

the pit

problems

in the works

last word
objects