This project was... potentially awesome but turned out to be very frustrating.

The assignment said to create a scene from something you did over the summer. One of the more exciting things I did over the summer was travel out of the country for the first time. I went to the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France. I was there for the duration of the 2 week long festival, interning for a small film company, seeing amazing movies, meeting important people, and enjoying the surroundings. After that experience, I headed over to Paris, France for a week with some friends to do some exploring.

I tried to find some cool 3D models of the sites I explored while in Paris, like the Eiffel Tower, the Lourve, the Notre-Dame cathedral, etc. I thought this would be an easy task since most of these places are super iconic and popular... Someone must've made a (free 3D model of them somewhere, right? Wrong. I was only able to find 3D models of the Eiffel tower, a low poly French flag, and some overly expensive models of the various sites I visited. I tried throwing the models of the Eiffel tower and the low poly French flag into my scene, but they were unfortunately they were 3DS and MAX files.  I downloaded 3DS and Cinema4D in order to convert these files into OBJs and imported them into my scene. I also found what claimed to be the entire cityscape of Paris, but I was a little skeptical... It didn't look like the city that I visited (it didn't even have the Eiffel tower) but I put it in there anyway because it was the only model that actually worked for me (and it's quite an impressive model). I also threw in the song, "Bella Norte," from Disney's Lady and the Tramp to give it that extra French feel.

After that, I tried scanning some objects using the 123D Catch app to put into my Paris scene. I bought a few souvenirs during my time abroad, so I thought it would be cool to throw those into my scene, since I wasn't able to find models of them anywhere online. However, this didn't work out either. The scanner did not seem to want to cooperate with what I was trying to do. I tried scanning several objects about 6-8 times each, but they either failed miserably or took way too long to process and ended up crashing. I even tried using objects unrelated to Paris (like my Baymax plushie or my friend's puppet she's building for her stop-motion animation), but none of those seemed to want to work either.

If we could go over this in class a bit more and find out why the 123D Catch app worked for some people but not for others, that would be fantastic. I'm assuming it has to do with lighting, how you took the pictures, etc. But I tried taking the pictures in different ways in different lighting, and nothing I did seemed to work. Is there a "formula" for creating a good 123D Catch model? I would also love to continue working on this scene if we can figure out what the issues are.

I was, however, able to scan myself and import it into my scene.  So now, I am sitting underneath the Eiffel Tower with some French flags around me, in front of the entire "city scape" of Paris. It is quite a random scene, but at least I got something scanned/ imported.