COSC 3P98 : Animation Project
“The
Wanderers”
By
Alex Kim and Peter Pottinger
Introduction
After giving consideration to many ideas, we decided on making a movie based on warriors’ journey thru the woods where he meets up with one of his buddies. You can view the movie here.
Alternatively if you have the free DivX 4.11 codec you can download a smaller, better resolution movie here.
Tools
† Poser 4 - used to create our characters, their movements and their surroundings.
† Fade to Black - this software was used to splice our scenes together
† Photoshop 7 - used for our opening and closing credits
† Dub it - used to import sound
† Adobe Premiere - used to overlaying our sound files
Audio
After we put our files together to create our animation, we wanted to give our viewers the sense of a gloomy movie. So we used sound effects such as footsteps, a wolf howling and noises one would hear if they were to be in a forest in the middle of the night. For our soundtrack we used the classic theme song from the game Doom.
Characters
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This is the
Michael character; we added the fireball above his hand with some flame effects
and lighting which he uses as a torch. His clothing is conformed to the body
so that it stays in place as he walks along the motion path. Human skin texture
was added to create a more lifelike character. |
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This is the campfire
scene, the wolf and his master as sitting beside the fire, which is animated.
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In this scene the
man commands the wolf to sit down with an arm movement. This movement was created
by using key frames within the animation. The movement was automatically tweened by the poser engine. The lighting effect was used to give a sense that the man was beside the campfire as seen in the last scene. |
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This is the wolf.
The bluish lighting effect implies that the wolf is sitting in the moonlight.
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Character Movements
This of course was the most difficult part of the whole animating experience. After many sleepless nights, and a lot of practice, we tried to create realistic movements for our characters. Although there was a learning curve to creating these movements Poser does have some very good methods to assists us. In the one scene where the character is sitting by the campsite meditating, using a technique called morphing we were able to simulate breathing. Another method that helped us create our movements was Poser's walking designer. Using this we were able to make our characters run and walk.
Environment
Our animation is located in a remote part of the woods. Where? We'll leave that up to you. Initially we planned to import our character models into Bryce. But after some research on the net, we found this option to be too time consuming and decided to create an environment using only Poser. We found out later that while Poser may be a great tool for modeling human and animal character animations, it's strength did not lie in creating a suitable environment for our characters. As a result, using the items and lighting options found in Poser we tried to create a dark and ominous atmosphere by adding a campfire prop and surrounding it with trees. We then found a ground texture that blended properly with our props and characters. Then using some lighting options such as spotlights, we centered our characters on this. The lighting method used allows a viewer to focus on the relevant actions within our scenes. For backgrounds we mainly used a black texture map.
Conclusion
Overall Poser 4 is great software for anybody who is interested in creating their own characters. Although there were some rough nights we enjoyed creating this animation and recommend others to try. As many of us do not have a great artistic background, the tools found in Poser and other animation software gives us the opportunity to use our imagination and create a movie we hope others will enjoy.