Cosc 3P98 Project
Done By Rebecca Black
@Fall/Winter 2001
View AVI movie here
Modeling
Textures
Lighting
Camera
Scenery
Animation
Rendering
Soundtrack
Image Clips
Tools
Conclusion
This video is for the user to get a sense of the life on the ocean. With birds flying in the air, waves moving, dolphins jumping out of the water, ships moving, and much more bring the life of the ocean to the viewer.
Modeling
Modeling allows objects within the movie to be presented as realistic as possible. By using proper techniques, this will allow the movie to be enhanced.
Objects within this movie are:
- Ship
- Dolphins
- Birds/Fishbirds
- Mountain
- Title
- Credits
- Sun
The dolphins are an imported object called dolphins.3ds which is found on the Bryce website. (download as .dxf format).
The birds/fishbirds are an imported object called fishbirds.3ds which is found on the Bryce website (download as .dxf format).
The mountain is made from the mountain/terrain object. The Mossy Rock material is used to create the realistic grassy effect on the mountain. The materials of the mountain has 23.9 bump height, 100 diffusion, 7.8 ambient, 26.6 specularity, 133 refraction, and 0 for metallicity, transparent, and reflection. The mountain shape (elevation) uses erode, sharpen, smooth, slope noise, height noise, and mounds for the editing tools in Bryce
The title uses an image that I made in Adobe Photoshop 5.0. It is a simple image that displays the title of the movie. The title material is 100 diffusion, 19.6 ambient, 100 refraction, and 0 for specularity, metallicity, bump height, transparency, and reflection. During the last part of the animation, the camera zooms in and out as well.
The credits uses an image that I made in Adobe Photoshop 5.0. The image shows that I made this movie and the year I made it (2001). The credit material is the same as the title. The credital meterial is 100 diffusion, 19.6 ambient, 100 refraction, and 0 for specularity, metallicity, bump height, transparency, and reflection. During the last part of the animation, the camera zooms in and out as well. The sun is an object that is used for lighting purposes even though it is not seen directly to the viewer. In fact, the sun is off the screen which affects the sky and the objects around the sun (the focal point). In the middle of the movie the sun sets and soon rises to show the lighting effects of the animation. At the beginning of the movie, the sun's visibility is 100% disk and glow intensity. The halo rings are 100 % instensity and 50% radius throughout the whole movie. The intensity of the sun's shadows are 90%. The link sun to view is 109.9 azimuth, and 27.7 in altitude throughout the whole movie as well.
Textures
Textures provide the surface of each object to be made realistically. There are many preferences/options that can be used. The scenes throughout the movie use reflection from the water. In more detail of textures for each object are mentioned within the 'lighting' and the 'modeling' section of this page.
Lighting
Lighting allows objects to have specific properties which are diffuse reflection, ambient, and specular lighting. This can be useful tools with visual effects allowing brightness/darkness to be shown.
The sky within this movie provides a way of using lighting. During the show the sun slowly sets. At the beginning there is a greater amount of light that reflects from all objects surrounding it such as the water. After some time, the sun starts to set. This makes the sky darker that the objects are harder to see since they are reflected by the amount of light from the sun (the focal point). The movie shows the sun setting during the frames where the mountain is shown. Throughout this movie, reflection from the water/ocean is used to represent a realistic approach to how objects are viewed in real life.
After the sun finishes setting, the sun rises to show the technique of the sun as the focal point in the movie. When the sun begins to rise, the light becomes lighter allowing objects around the focal point to be lighter as well. Another lighting technique used in this movie is creating a spotlight. This is the cone shaped lighting object used at the top of the mountain to show that the right side has more bright light then the rest of the mountain.
Camera
The camera moves around during the whole animation. Therefore, the world view is different each time the camera moves. The world view is what the viewer sees on the screen. Anything else (like the sun) is not visible to the user. At the beginning of the animation, the camera turns right (where the ship moves away from the mountain towards the left of the screen) and then turns moves left where the viewer sees the dolphins and the fishes. After that, the camera moves rightward following the ship and leftward when the mountain appears. Once the ship moves on the right side of the mountain, the camera then moves around the right side of the moutain and the credits and title appears. When the credits and the title cubes are shown clear enough to see the words, the camera then moves in and out to have a greater effect so that the viewer can feel like he or she is really on the ocean.
Scenery
As mentioned earlier, the scene is on an ocean. Objects used help provide what life is like on the ocean. Waves, dolphins, a ship, fishbirds, are some of the objects that are used to help the user know what life is like on the ocean. Also, there is reflection from the water which gives a more realistic view of how object interact with the ocean.
Animation
This movie has these objects which are animated:
- Ship
- Birds/Fishbirds
- Dolphins
- Sun
- Mountain
- Credits
- Title
The birds/fishbirds are in two groups. The first group is clearly seen which follow the ship. These birds move from the right side of the camera towards the left side of the camera. Not clearly seen, the second group is behind the first group who move from the center of the camera towards the right side of the camera.
The dolphins are shown after the ship arrives at the left side of the camera. There are 3 groups of three dolphins who jump out of the water and back in. Only one group of 3 dolphins comes back out of the water again and goes back in for the second time.
The sun is the focal point for the lighting within the movie. This focal point changes when the mountain is viewed within the video. At this time, the sun begins to set allowing the objects around the focal point to be darker. After the sun finishes setting, the sun begins to rise allow the objects around the focal point to be lighter. The sun is not visible on the scene to the viewer. Instead it is off the scene, but still has a huge effect on the lighting to the objects that are seen on the screen.
The mountain is shown after the ship, birds, and dolphins have been shown/animated. The camera moves to get different angles of the mountain. The clouds in the sky appear to move which creates a realistic effect of movement. The credits is the cube at the end of the movie which appears on the right side as the camera moves around the mountain. On each side of this cube has the information "Done By Rebecca Black Copyright 2001". Using the camera, it zooms in and out to get a great effect towards the viewer to make the ending look realistic. The title is the cube at the end of the movie which appears on the top left of the screen when the camera moves around the mountain. On each side of this cube has the information "An Ocean's Life" in picture format. Using the camera, it zooms in and out to get a great effect towards the viewer to make the ending look realistic.
Rendering
Rendering must be used in this computer graphics movie. This allows the conversion of graphics from a file into visual form. This conversion allows a high-level object-based description to be made into a graphical image for display. Using the program Bryce, is user friendly, but yet the more complicated the scene is the longer the time for the animation to render. Bryce in general is a good program but compared to other graphics animation programs, it takes way to long to render a program.
Soundtrack
By providing sounds within the movie, the viewer can feel as though they are part of the scene. Hearing these sounds have a huge impact on the viewer.
Within this movie the sound used is a song called "Blue Horizon" from the CD "Natural Sleep Inducement: Solitudes Music For Your Health". This song has sounds such as birds singing, waves moving across the water, and other naturalistic noises.
In order for this song file to be played properly in the animation file, I had to use several programs to add this into the animation file. I had to first use the program Audiograbber to convert the song file to a .wav extension. After that was made, I used the program Goldwave to trim the .wav file to start from the 1 minute mark to 1 minute and 30 seconds. Adobe Premiere 5.0 was the last program that was needed to achieve this new movie. I had to import both the bryce animation file and the .wav sound file into the project. After the properties were correct, I could then export the project into the new .avi animation file; the final product!!!
Image Clips
Here are some image clips from the animation to give you a sense of the details of the movie:
- The ship and the mountain (at the beginning of the animation)
- The birds and the dolphins (at the beginning of the animation
after the previous image)
- The mountain (shown near the middle of the animation)
- The ship and the mountain during sunset (shown near the
middle of the animation but after the previous image)
- The credits and the title (shown at the end of the animation)
Tools
Tools that are used to create this movie are:
- Bryce 5 (used the majority of the time during this project) - used to make the animation file with the birds, mountain, ship, and much more to move into a movie
- Bryce 4 (used only during the beginning stage of this project) - I only used version 4.0 when I started this project to make the ship. After the ship was finished, I converted it to version 5.0 and worked off of that file since then
- Windows Media Player (.AVI) - this was used to view the current Bryce 5.0 animation
- Adobe Photoshop 5.5 - this program was used to make the credit and the title into 2 separate pictures. These pictures were textured separately to its own cube at the end of the movie. Each side of both cubes had the indicated picture textured to it
- Bryce Website - used dolphins.3ds and fishbird.3ds to import into Bryce 5. These are found at 3D Cafe which is located at http://www.3dcafe.com/asp/animals.asp
- Programmer's File Editor - this is a text editor that was used to create the web page through HTML code.
- Internet Explorer - this was used to preview the web page
- Netscape Navigator - this was only used to make sure that the web page would be compatible in both browsers used to access the Internet.
- AudioGrabber - this was used to convert the solitudes song (the track on the CD) to a .wav extension
- Adobe Premiere 5.0 - this was used to import both the sound file and the animation file into a new file in which both old files are played concurrently. This program did not work for me like I wanted it to, so I used MGI Video Wave trial version instead which worked.
- Goldwave - this was used to trim the .wav extension to play from 1 minute to a 1 minute and 30 second sound file
- MGI Video Wave 4.0 - this was a trial version that I used to import both the .avi animation file and the sound file (.wav) into a new .avi file
- VirtualDub 1.4.7 - used to compress the file that has the animation and the sound to it. The video is Microsoft MPEDG4v2 and the audio is MP3 at 28kbit/sec quality
In conclusion, I have enjoyed working on Bryce and learning more details now then I knew in the past about this program. Learning Bryce 5.0 on my own has helped me produce better quality animations. Especially the fact that before, I never knew how to add sound to my animation. This I had to learn myself and as a result, allows the viewer to become part of the animation which has a greater affect on the result of the movie. To see some other work I have done, please click on my portfolio. By clicking on the Bryce Link from this new website, you can see some of the pictures I have made using both Bryce 4.0 and Bryce 5.0.
I have also tried to include many of the graphics concepts that I have been taught in this graphics course over this past semester. These concepts mentioned (in no particular order) below are all part of the animation:
- Shadows
- Resizing objects
- Rotating objects
- Reposition/translation of objects
- Bump mapping
- Reflection of a surface
- Depth
- 3D/2D Texture
- Linear Interpolation
- Lighting Techniques (such as diffusion, ambient, specularity, and intensity)
- Colour
- Grouping/Ungrouping objects
- World view/camera view and movement
- Cloud/fog/Haze movement
Sincerely,
Rebecca Black