Week 7 Updates: Midterm Exam

Proposal Abstract

For the midterm, I had a lot of plans that I wasn't exactly able to figure out how to articulate yet. I talked about my plan in my last post, which was to create a scene of a pond, with a frog-faced sphere shape hopping across four lily pads in the water. 


Production Log

My general ideas/plans going into the project were:

- Use the NURBS primitive cylinder shape to create the 4 lily pads, make them flat and position them so that they look like they're sitting on top the water. Spread them out across the pond but make them close enough for the frog to hop between them. 

- Make a NURBS primitive plane and make it a light blue color. Add a phong texture and adjust the setting to make it look more like water. Ex. Play around with the specular's shading and color to make it look as though the sun is reflecting off of the water.

- Use a NURBS primitive sphere shape for the frog, make it small enough to fit on the lily pads. Then, follow the instructions from the bouncing ball tutorial to add a face to the sphere, but use a picture of a frog's face instead. 

- Add a spotlight following the tutorial as well, and focus the spotlight only on the area of the pond with the lily pads.

- Using keys and other features described in the bouncing ball tutorial, animate the frog jumping across each lily pad until it reaches the end of the screen -- jumps off into the area of the pond without the spotlight on it, then goes back to start. 


Self-Evaluation

While I was able to accomplish a lot of that to create the general scene I wanted, I still need to work on a lot of details before it looks the way I planned. The lily pads look the way I wanted them to and the water looks pretty good, as I was able to make it look better by changing the size and color of the plane's specular to make it resemble the sun reflecting off of the water. The spotlight generally looks how I want it to look, focusing on a specific area of the pond. However, when it came to the supposed-to-be frog, I ran into a couple of problems. I tried following the bouncing ball tutorial to help me with adding a face to the sphere, but I somehow messed up the view a lot in my Hypershade panel, which made it difficult to work with and create materials. I tried for awhile using the exact steps from the tutorial to get a picture of a frog's face on the NURBS sphere, but it wasn't happening so instead I gave the sphere a dark green color for now. When it came to the animation, I also ran into some trouble with certain things, but I was successfully able to make the "frog" stop each time it landed on a lily pad. I used keys to do this, having the frog land on each lily pad and stay there for a moment before hopping to the next one. Ultimately, the project needs a lot of work since I have very little experience with animation. It is essentially a different version of the first tutorial we did, since what we learned there is just about the extent of my knowledge. Here is a look at the current state of the scene, without the full animation. 







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