COSC 3P98 Animation Project: Flying Raptor
by Yasser Taeima
Introduction:
This project is very simple!!. It makes use of the camera movement and a mixture of objects from Bryce and Poser (imported into Bryce).
The scenes start with a global view of the island, mountain, rainbow and waterfall. Then the camera finds the raptor which takes off for a fly around the mountain. The camera follows the flying raptor in from different angels. Finally, the raptor lands back on land and the camera performs a 360 around it.
Tools:
Poser:
The main character in the animation was imported from Poser. Poser is mainly used for humans, but it also includes some models for animals
Bryce:
This is the main tool used to create the scene and the animation of the raptor's wings. It conatins many built in textures that allows for a variety of options.
Modelling:
Raptor:
This model is imported from Poser. The texture has been added to the object after it was imported. The texture used is a Mountain & Rock texture. White areas are introduced on the texture when slope increases, which give an effect of snow. This gave the raptor an effect as if it had snow on its back whick kind of matches the snow on the mountains.
Raptor's wings:
The wings were built from scratch, with the assistance of some Bryce tutorials. They were very simple to make and the wings give a whole new life to the raptor. A Flying Raptor !!!
Building the first wing:
The wing was built using the terrain editor to create the bones of the wing.
Just set the terrain to the ground level. Then, with a hard brush simply paint the bones. Save it. Then, add the desired texture to it.
Put it back in the editor and paint the entire wing. Save It. Then, add texture to it.
Building the second wing:
As simple as, copy the first wing, paste it, you got the second wing.
Waterfall:
Similar to the wings, using the terrain editor draw the waterfall as it will be viewed from the top. Then add the water texture on it. That's all there is to the waterfall!
Mountain:
Mountain object is built in into Bryce. Changing the object structure is accessable via terrain editor
Lighting & Texture:
Bryce provides various types of lighting and textures.
For this production, sun light was the main source of lighting since it was an open field scene. Rock with snow was used on mountains and raptor. A semi-transparent texture was applied on the wings
The ability of changing the texture attributes in bryce is very powerfull -- transperance, reflection, defusion, .. etc --, but when it came to water I found it very hard to reach a texture that would be similar to real water.
Sound & Music:
The sound played with the animation is the beginning of a song played by the band Savatage.
It is called "Mozart And Madness".
The choice of music is slow and relaxing based on the nature of the scene.
Monday, 7th January, 2002