COSC 3P98 ANIMATION PROJECT

Dragon Ball Z

© Herman Yu Autumn 2002

™ View the Video (AVI Format - 5.6 MB)

Background

I always enjoy watching Japanese animations since I was a little kid. Dragon Ball Z is one of my favourites. By using Corel Bryce 5.0, I have created the following objects using various tools and operations in the application: great-wall entrance, dai-luo (chinese musical instrument), 7 dragon balls, and squared fighting stage. Please enjoy my short animation!

	Front view	Back view
Great-wall entrance
Dai-luo
Dragon Balls
Fighting Stage

 

System Specifications
Software	Hardware	Other Stats
Corel Bryce 5.0 Adobe Photoshop 6.0 VideoFramer v1.06	Windows 98 512 RAM ATI Radeon 32DDR	Resolution: 240 x 180 Data rate: 250 kb/s Frame rate: 24 frames/s Total objects: 71 objects Total polygons: 7878 Total Frames: 754 Uncompressed file size: 96 Mb

Animation Setting

This animation takes place at the "World Martial Arts Tournament" from its storyline. My idea is to create a theme, which would remind people of all the fighting scenes from its many different episodes. And for those people who have not watched Dragon Ball Z before, it would give them a very nice introduction of what this animation is all about.

The make of Animation - Models

"Great-wall Entrance" - it consists of the following objects:

• 2 big columns - made from 2 cylinders
• the header block - made from a pyramid and a cube
• the wall - made from a cube
• metal door - will discuss below
• engraved words - words made from Adobe Photoshop, and then map them to the wall by changing material values in Bryce (will discuss below)

NOTE: By using boolean operations, I am able to create a hole (set to negative value) on the wall (set to positive value) from which we can see through it. A metal door is then put in to fill the hole. This result in the "Great-wall Entrance".

"Metal Door" - it consists of the following objects:

• metal screws - 9 spheres
• door knob - sphere
• door - cube, inverted cylinder

NOTE: By using boolean operations, I created half of the door first. And then I copied this finished object to produce the end-product "Metal Door".

"Engraved Words" - in case you are wondering what they mean, they are"Chinese characters" meaning "the World of Martial Arts". I created the characters using Adobe Photoshop created a jpeg file, and then I mapped this file to the wall.

"Dai-luo" - it consists of the following objects:

• Stand - 2 cylinders
• 3 red strings - 3 cylinders
• Dai-luo - 2 spheres (one positive value, and one negative value)
• Stick - 2 cylinders

NOTE: By using the boolean operations, I am able to create the very nice "Dai-luo" effect (front and back views, pls see above pictures for comparison).

Texture of Dai-luo

Dragon Balls - I created the stars in Adobe Photoshop, and then I mapped each of them to a sphere.

Fighting Stage - the simpliest object made by a cube.

Audio Effect

Two wav files were downloaded from the internet. They bring the whole animation into different and higher level. The two files are:

Project Digest

Corel Bryce is a very interesting and powerful application. Although, it did take me a long time to get used to its unique interface. My original plan was to create some characters in Poser, and manipulate the scene settings in Bryce. But I could not locate any good documentations or reference materials in this area, and also the huge amount of rendering time in Bryce had discouraged me from fullfilling my original plan.

I did enjoy this project a lot and from making this animation, I understand that how and why all the production of animations are broken in different groups: story plot, animation, cutting frames, and audio/sound effects so on and so forth. And from doing research on this project, I also noticed that in 80% of the Japanese animations, they are using "drawing/sketch" in making the scenes.

Any comments ? Herman Yu

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