COSC 3P98 Animation Project
My Piggy
Behind
the scene
© Hoi Ying Janice Cho
January 2002
click here to see my GALLERY or click on me to watch my video
Introduction
One day, if you are being trapped in a gate but the gate's door is suddenly opened, what would you do? In my animation, you will see what a pig would do with my imagination. The idea of the animation is based on myself since I am a pig lover. By using the boolean operations in Corel Bryce 4.0 and 5.0, I created the pig as the main character and a farm house as part of the scene setting.
Environment
Hardware
Software
Models/ Texture
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My Piggy The pig is created by applying the boolean operations on the built-in objects in Bryce as following: Head Ears: 2
Cones per ear* Body: 5 spheres Leg: a sphere
and a cube*
* - used the boolean operation in Bryce |
Texture
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| Farm House |
Texture
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Roof : a pyramid and a cube Door: a cube
Windows: cubes with glass texture House-base: cube
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| Gate |
Texture
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2 cylinders to make a cross and duplicate the cross and line them up as a circle |
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| Models from Bryce | ||
| Rocks | ||
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| Water farm | ||
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Grass Duplications of the grass object makes the water farm.
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| The end scene |
Texture
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Sound
Sounds bring a sense of realism for the audience and create a strong effect for the change of each scene. There are four sound clips in my animation.
Since the midi files that I got from the web were rather long (4-5minutes) and my animation is 39 seconds only, I used Sound Editor to split and join parts of the music that I needed for my animation together. This procedure of the sound mixing took me about 3 hours for each song. Firstly, I needed to choose some part of the midi file, recorded them to a .wav file. Then, I brought the .wav file to the Sound Editor to do the mixing so that the rhythm of the sound clip would go with my animation. The background music that I got for the happy piggy was more than 4 minutes long. I split the file into 3 short clips. I trimmed the parts of music that I wanted. Then I listened to them carefully for many times and I watched the animation at the same time to see which part of the music could go with the scene. After choosing the right part of the music, I used Sound Editor to start doing the mixing procedure. The 17 seconds happy piggy background music that I used in my animation was actually a merge of 3 .wav files from the separate parts of a 4.27 minutes long midi file.
Prospective
All of the scenes in the animation were recorded from the camera view by moving the camera in different angles. I wanted to invite my audience to get themselves into the animation with the pig. For example, the scene of the pig checking if there was anybody around, and the scene of the pig running up the hill, I put the camera to the pig's eyes so that the camera moved with the pig's eyes and body.
Conclusion
Bryce 4.0 and 5.0 are pretty easy software for self-learning. Using the key frames to build up the scenes may be a bit tricky for the new users. I found that it was relatively easy because I used another animation software (Flash) before. However, after making the whole animation, I found out one thing is not handy in Bryce was Bryce has a help menu without any contents. I am also not sure if Bryce allows the user to add the missing frames or not.
I really enjoy taking COSC 3P98 a lot. I wish I could have more time in learning more about animation and graphics. One semester is really not enough for us to enjoy a course like this!
^oo^
( OO ) Janice Cho
