Final Project

My midterm project consisted of an external view of a temple. For the final, I decided to add character to the animation as well as an exterior to the temple. For the character, I wanted to keep it a first person perspective as in the midterm, but add arm(s) and/or a body.


The first the I worked on was the interior. To keep it from being boring, I thought it would need stuff in it, which lead to this:



Ultimately, rather than a wall hanging, these wound up in the final project as the character's sword. I also decided to light the interior with torches:




Once I'd had the idea of using torches, it was a short leap to creating a long hallway of torches, and then having them light sequentially sending light down the hall (and effect I've always liked):




I then moved on to creating the "character of the animation" opting to go for an arm:



Apparently, joints don't scale down in size when you attach them to small objects, so there is a lot of overlap and it's difficult to distinguish between the joints for the shoulder/elbow/wrist/two knuckles per finger. This was a situation where I was extremely grateful for the Outliner.

The next step was attaching the arm to the camera (consequently making the tangle of joints even worse, but beyond a certain point it doesn't really make a difference and it was all still fully functional):



I made created significantly more shadow in the exterior than had existed in the mid term version, so I decided to give my character a portable light source. Initially, I wanted to have him carry his own torch around, but there was some difficulty scaling the particle effects properly and so I opted to create a lantern for him instead:




The final end result:




Overall, I'm very pleased with how it turned. A few things didn't wind up being how I had initially expected, such as the torch->lantern switch, but worked as well or better. The one thing I would change would be to slow it down in parts, but the time required to render anything of significant length would be a bit excessive. I think that the part I wound up enjoying most was playing with the lighting and shadows. Some parts are a little dark, but the effect comes out approximately how I had wanted it.

Nurbs model - textured

This is a rock outcropping I created using NURBS.

Lowman

Greetings from lowman!

Rendered still with lighting and shaders

This is a still of the final version of my final model including final lighting and shaders.

The Temple

The primary goal I set out with was to make a Temple-like structure with an appropriate surrounding. Fairly broad but simple.

I'm relatively satisfied with the result. I want to work a bit on the lighting from the fires out front still. If I could do it over, I'd have focused more on variations in positioning than intensity in order to get the effect I was looking for. The textures turned out fairly well, although I want to spruce up the stairs a bit. I also obviously need to add an interior. In fact, the one thing I definitely learned is that making sure to save frequently doesn't help at all if you don't make sure the location you are saving to actually has enough space to keep the file. Despite that minor setback, though, I do really like how it turned out, especially the camera perspective, although I wish I could have allowed more time for it to "look around" without having to have added hours to the render time.

Setting and Motion

I created a plane for the temple to sit on and applied a dirt image that I found on Google to it. I then created a rock out cropping out of a few spheres and applied the same texture.




I added in a camera. Using key frames, it starts off to the side, does a quick scan of the temple and then moves toward the steps. The motion was a bit smooth, so I keyframed some vertical motion along the path to the steps so that it would feel a bit more like someone walking. At the top of the steps, I keyframed the doors rotating to open for the camera.

Stone Carving

I started over on the statue. I made the new one (left in the above pic) slightly smaller than the original (right in the above picture). I also gave it significantly more sections to allow me to sculpt it with greater detail. The texture on the helmet piece is an image of metal that I took from Google and applied as a Blinn.