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Rugby is today's fastest growing women's collegiate sport. Yet many people, including new players, don't know how it is played. Most rookies don't really understand the game until they finish playing a few games. This site seeks to help with understanding the game by providing visual guides to the game, and should be useful to both spectators and players, current and prospective. We have paired computer-generated diagrams and images with photographs, so these images will translate easily to real-life experience.
Our site uses images generated in Poser and Maya to explain the concepts central to rugby. We also address a small amount of rugby strategy, enough for any rookie to get started, or for a spectator to follow the game. We created a field with simplified characters for use in full-field explanations. For example, here is an image which explains the layout of the field.
The combination of image and text helps the reader understand what is happening. We also pair orthographics views with perspective views, so the reader can understand what is happening, and then see what it might look like on the field. The example shown here explains how holes in the defense are exploited if the defense does not stay flat.
We used Poser to model life-like figures to explain how certain techniques are used in rugby. Here is a stillframe series of a girl being tackled. These examples can easily translate to the real-time game situation, when paired with text and photographs as seen throughout the site.
We gained technical knowledge in the use of Maya and Poser. Since we were using our practical knowledge to illustrate the site, we did not learn very many hard facts about rugby, but we did learn more about the nuances of the sport since we were required to visualize and explain them to other people.
Our overall goals of creating a site that would explain rugby have been met. We feel that visitors to the site will come away with a better understanding of the game. Those who have never seen the game will be able to recognize certain techniques and plays when they do see a game, and those who have seen the game may be able to put the pieces together more effectively once they have visited our site.
Our site is very successful in its main goal. We are excited about this because there are not very many other extensive resources about rugby which are on such a basic level. We hope that our project will increase interest in rugby, especially for women, by demystifying the sport a little, and fostering curiosity about it.
We may not have made as many animations as we originally planned to do, due to technical difficulties with software. We feel, however, that we accomplished the same result using different tactics. Pairing photographs with our images was particularly successful.
We plan to continue improving the site in the future, and developing it as a resource for our team and for the communities of women's rugby and rugby everywhere.