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.