JEFFERSON - Jefferson Middle School students Hal Jarrett and Ben Rigsby usually make it to school each day without getting harassed by aliens or zombie hordes, but that doesn't mean life in their hometown wouldn't make a great video game.<br />
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Jarrett, 13, and Rigsby, 14, both in eighth grade, have spent the past month creating 3-D models of buildings in their hometown, models that easily could be incorporated into popular ultra-realistic games like "Halo" or "Call of Duty."<br />
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They're part of a larger effort, funded by a grant from search-engine giant Google and tech training company Go-2-School, to create 3-D models of all the cities in Jackson County.<br />
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Instead of providing a playground for make-believe zombies, Jefferson's 3-D model will allow online visitors to stroll down city streets and get an up-close view of downtown buildings by pointing and clicking a computer mouse.<br />
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Google chose only five cities nationwide to participate in the 3-D mapping program aimed at developing a model that can be used as an economic development and community planning tool.<br />
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Jarrett and Rigsby are among about two dozen volunteers who are using Google SketchUp and Google Earth to make 3-D models of buildings in Jefferson. When they are complete, these individual models will be combined to create a model of downtown.<br />
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First, the boys photograph their subject building from every possible angle and take as many measurements of the building's exterior as they can. They start carefully fitting the photos together in Google SketchUp, a free modeling software, to create a 3-D image of the building, using the measurements to ensure their model is to scale.<br />
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"The only thing that's particularly hard is getting a good photo of your building," Jarrett said, recently stalking around the parking lot of Mike's Grill to find ways to capture the whole building on his camera.<br />
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"It's hard when the buildings are so close together, and the places that might be good to take photos from are places you can't get to."<br />
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The process can best be described as tedious, said Lindy Pals, a media specialist at Jefferson Middle School who's overseeing the boys' project.<br />
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"What's amazing to me is the patience they have," Pals said.<br />
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"You have to be willing to sit there, try one thing for a while and then start over when it doesn't work out. It's just trying - trying different things until it's the way you want it."<br />
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On one particular morning last week, Rigsby was modeling the barbecue pit behind Jefferson First Christian Church. The church portion of his model is almost complete, with stone texture walls, a perfectly sloped roof and accurate trim work.<br />
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Jarrett and Rigsby approached their parents and teachers about joining the massive modeling project after reading about it in a local newspaper. Jefferson Mainstreet Director Beth Laughinghouse and Jackson County GIS Director Joel Logan, who are organizing the project locally, hadn't intended to include middle-schoolers in the project, but decided the boys would be good additions.<br />
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"We were very impressed in the training," Logan said, about the daylong workshop he helped coordinate. "They were running circles around the adults in the room."<br />
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Rigsby, who's interested in architecture in general, started creating his own buildings in Google SketchUp a few years ago. When he read about the project, he thought it would be a chance to get some experience.<br />
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Jarrett has experimented with all sorts of computer coding but also likes working on graphics, so the project caught his eye.<br />
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They were able to persuade teachers and administrators to let them ditch their traditional art classes each morning so they could work on the project with Pals in the school media center's computer lab.<br />
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Other students are participating in Google's modeling program, but Jarrett and Rigsby are unique in the fact that they're not doing it as part of a class project, said Jodi Lane, who helped train volunteers for the program in Jefferson for Go-2-School.<br />
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Many volunteers will turn in rough drafts of their first building models early next month, but the entire project - including of models of all nine cities in Jackson County - will be complete and online by May.
