Final Project Retrospective

For the final project, I wanted to have a fight scene between two characters.  I already had the staff created from my midterm, as well as a sword I made a couple years ago in 3DS MAX.  However, my project idea became more and more far fetched as I continued to put off working on it.  In the end, I was able to put together a very quick back and forth between two characters as I had wanted, although the time constraint required me to be a lot more stringent and frugal with my time than I would have liked.

Originally I wanted to make my own characters for the animation, as 3D modelling is still my favorite step of the project.  But, I had to make my biggest sacrifice there in substituting LowMan instead. The sword I made already fit well with the medieval fantasy theme that the wizard staff from my midterm was going for.  So, I only needed to model a kite shield to go with it.

The sword I referenced when making mine was the Balder Knight's Side Sword from Dark Souls, seen here:

Below that is the sword and its accompanying shield that I made:


Overall I like how the shield came out. It doesn't hold up under very close scrutiny, but the "scratched metal" texture that I used on the sword ended up working very well when placed over top of the blue-and-gold grid blinn used on the shield.





Trying to get the short burst of flame to look okay was one of the harder challenges in this project. The particle emitter would not emulate properly unless a frame was specifically rendered.  So, checking to make sure the fire worked as intended was a very time consuming process that I ended up needing to take a leap of faith on.  It came out better than expected, however the final few frames could be vastly improved.  I didn't see a way to easily get the flame to dissipate, since I could not afford to continue rendering the final frames. I tried to remove visibility of the object the flame was mapped to, but that did not work, so I decided to just cut to the next camera sooner. In retrospect, the flame effect could have been improved if I used a torus rather than a cone to map the flames. Due to the nature of the particle effects, the original shape is indistinguishable anyways, and a torus would allow for a better dissipation of fire by decreasing its inner ring radius.


Overall, I think I did an okay job on the project. There was not enough time to render on a higher quality, so the lighting ended up looking like I didn't actually put lights in the scene at all.  The jittery pace of the scenes made the video feel a little schizophrenic, but in each quick scene the camera was steady and moved exactly how I wanted it to.  I feel the camera work did a competent job of making something decent out of very little.

Final Project Progress Report 2

With 11 hours left until it is time to present final projects (8 hours until the time I would ideally have the animation rendered), progress on my own animation has been slow.  Both characters are for the most part animated, albeit with a few too many shortcuts taken.  Cameras have been added in such a way to hide those shortcuts from being visible as much as possible.

When trying to add a breath of fire coming from the staff (pictured above), the particle effect gets unruly and very quickly engulfs the entire screen with flame, although I am not sure if that problem would carry over to the actual render shots.  At any rate, adding particle effects to a dynamic object (such as this magic spell) is a much different beast than adding effects to a static polygon like the torches from the midterm.

Final Project Update 1

With roughly 18 hours left until the due date, work on my final project has officially begun!

So far I have duplicated LowMan, and differentiated them by giving them different textures (a shiny dark grey blinn for the warrior's armor and a deep blue lambert for the wizard's robes). Then, I gave the staff from my midterm to the wizard and parented it to his right hand.
I exported a sword (made as a personal for-fun project) from 3DSMAX for the warrior, and created a similar looking shield to match it, parented to the warrior's left and right hand, respectively.

Catching up on Previous Assignments

During the last class of the year [5/2/2016] I worked on a previous assignment, practicing animating with LowMan.  Due to computer problems at home I was not able to post to my blog until recently. Seen below are 3 screenshots of LowMan going from T-Pose, into a defensive stance, then striking.
I used direct kinematics to move him around.