Morro Bay Sunset

Aimee Davis

In my project I wanted to try to capture the beauty that is San Luis Obispo! I love our beautiful ocean sunsets. I created a scene to look like a Morro Bay sunset. The sun is following the equation of an eclipse, lighting up the scene as it rises/sets.

Project Features

The key features in my final project are:

• Texture mapping
  • Morro Rock, the water, and the sand all have different textures applied to them.

• Blinn-Phong lighting
  • The sun acts as the directional light in the scene.

• Implementation of a skybox
  • A skybox creates the effect of a sunset sky
  • The view vector was manipulated so that the skybox looks as if it is never ending - if the camera moves, the skybox moves with it.

Problems Encountered

The main problems I encountered while developing were:

1. The skybox faces were originally oriented upside down. This required an additional function call from the image loader to flip the images before being loaded.
2. My initial object files did not have texture coordinates so my objects would appear black. This required downloading new object files for my scene. 
3. Creating two ground planes with different textures that appeared to be one infinite plane. I played around with multiple different ideas for this, however none looked good/realistic. To achieve what I have above, I drew one ground plane, manipulated the texture and model, and then drew the second ground plane.

Key Interactions

W: move forward in scene

S: move backward in scene

A: move left in scene

D: move right in scene

Use cursor to move camera 360* around scene.

References

Skybox Tutorial - Explains how to create a cubebox and implement a skybox

Skybox Image - This site has many skyboxes available to download for free

* I also referenced the provided Lab 9 code for texture mapping *