Mabel Zhang

I'm a second-year Computer Science major. I hit a lucky star one day and was accepted into the 2008 Cailt2 Undergraduate Summer Scholars Research Program, which runs for 10 weeks with wonderful events and ends with a poster session.

Sun Modular Data Center 3D Interactive Model

I'm currently working on the Sun Blackbox model. See Projects page for a summary.

2008 Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Research Program

In summer 2008, I worked on the Virtual Calit2 Building under the advisory of Dr. Jürgen Schulze. The objective in the project is to add dynamic elements so that the model is more realistic and can thus provide better experience for demos and experiments conducted in the StarCAVE using the model.

News Release

News release featuring this project and others: Summer Scholars Take 'Audio-Visual' Research to the Next Level

Week 1

3ds Max tutorials in basics, modeling, some animation, etc.

Week 2

Automatic opening doors

Week 3

Presentation 1: everyone from teams A & B in the program presented an introduction of their summer project Automatic closing doors Completed all floors and renamed most objects with easily identifiable names Completed staircases, arranged to align to floor planes and stair well, welded gaps Polygon optimization using Max Modifiers like MultiRes

Week 4 to 8

Elevators: create cab and key objects, changed textures as needed, searched for elevator models, tried 1st to implement elevator in Max, tried 2nd with MAXScript, tried last to interpret code from Mailand aufzug then wrote our own, guessed meanings and documented code, debugged and updated code Optimization along debugging: changed VRML ImageTexture nodes to use DEFs/USEs keyword to save map memory and avoid system crash, commented out automatically generated INTERPs and TIMERs that continuously generate polygons during runtime, etc.; remade all floors using instances Presentation 2: week 7, everyone from team B in the program presented an update to their summer project Elevator finally working in week 8.

Week 9 to 10

Indoor lighting Sunlight animation Sunlight according to system clock Finalized documentation in all VRML files with manual scripts and JavaScripts; updated README file; added important ideas and hints to Wiki Project page Gathering files and relevant information for poster