For the past month I have been working at an internship for the local fire district. My task for the month was to make two interactive virtual tours. One would be a fire engine and the other the protective gear a firefighter wears. This was a large task. I had to put in the modeling work it takes to make a fire engine with all the components and cabinets a real one has and to model not only a firefighter but also the equipment one wears. Not just that, but I had to write a web application from scratch in order to interact with these models. I had a long month ahead of me.

    The first part of the time I had I spent on the fire engine. The hard edges and man made nature of it makes it closer to what I typically work on after all. I also decided to go for a lower poly count. This was both done for stylistic choice but also to make it easier for the browser to load once it becomes a web app. For reference I got to tour the fire station and take pictures of every angle and cabinet of the engine. It is truly a beautiful machine, full of details and interesting features. Once I had these references, I was able to start modeling. It was more detailed than the usual process of modeling because I had a lot more details and dials I had to keep track of. The inside of each cabinet was also modeled to show the contents.

    The next step was modeling the firefighter. Humans need to be more organic, especially if I am to show off detail. I sculpted the face, which is not usually something I do, and I modeled the rest as usual. For reference I got to take pictures of all the firefighter personal protective equipment as well as what they look like on a firefighter. It's a more than I had thought and it's quite heavy. As I modeled I had to keep in mind that each layer of the outfit needed to be kept separate so they could be shown one at a time later. Using a trick with the normals I was able to get it to look like a higher poly count while still keeping it quite low. This trick is known as normal baking and it is quite useful. These are the final results with and without all the gear.

    After this I was onto arguably the most difficult step, making the web application. Prior to this project I had worked with web design and javascript so I did know the programming language, however WebGL was an entirely new field to me. It was something of which I knew little to nothing. I had to learn a lot of new concepts but that's what internships are for. To start I made the fire engine application. For this I went with a guided model whereby pressing screen buttons or the arrow keys you could navigate to the different scenes around the engine and be presented with a text box describing the importance of the on screen component. For the firefighter application I went with a different layout where a user can press screen buttons to view the different layers and get a description of what it does as well as have the ability to rotate and zoom in on the model. I figured this would be the most effective method for showing this one off.

    All in all I'd say I learned a lot from the internship and have really grown in my knowledge of things I didn't even know I wanted to learn. Usually I would share the final project result, but the actual applications are owned by the fire district now and as such I am not allowed to share those in full. I hope this description of my work was enough for now and I will keep this updated in case the fire district puts them out publicly on their website.