Design Practice 2: Animation: Development (3)

3rd person perspective of boat moving through water

Swamp Plant Life

Fire tourches, waves & bridge

I am in the final process of incorporating my created props and scare scenes into the mechanics of the ride, It's a slow process as I have to check between the perspective viewport and the camera viewport to confirm what the audience will actually see when rendered. I don't want my boat to go through walls or my underwater crocodiles to be visible before I want them, this would ruin the realism and shock values. I want the audience to feel as drawn into this environment as possible, letting them experience the journey spontaneously rather than picking up on errors.

Other interesting things to mention -

I have viewed real life footage from existing theme park rides to remind myself what a first person perspective would look and feel like on a ride, the view of a person would normally be constantly changing due to a mixture of involuntary head movement from the shaking of the cart to the voluntary movement of the person rotating there head to look at the scenery/action.

Through this research the camera in my ride is rarely static, to create an authentic experience I have my camera scanning the surrounding area from my cart to replicate what a real person would do, the audience gets to view props and scenery from different angles all the time rather than just straight on, this give them the opportunity to look at there surroundings in much more detail and overall creates a exiting 3D world to explore rather than being restricted to flat 2D . When action scenes kick in the camera will react accordingly, such as a jump backwards when shocked or a tilted view to normal to represent someone sitting up from being knocked down 

My lighting incorporates the horror genre by lowing the tint and by enabling strong shadows to create an eerie and tense atmosphere, instead of using a mixture of lights or using techniques such as the 3 point, I decided to go with the one dominant light to represent the sun. The sun is the main light source shining down through the canapes of the trees, creating strong rays of lights and shadows from the leafs.

I have added the cliche generic fog that every scary haunted swamp would be lost without. One thing i do need to watch out for is that my fog and lighting do not impede or overwhelm the detail of my objects, I need a good depth of field, for example I want the distance to be distorted and mysterious while keeping the closeup visible and realistic.

Example of how light pierces through the tree tops and how the depth of view is created by fog

Online Research Tutorials:

http://www.xedium3d.com/tutorials/wakes/
http://3drockstar.com/creating-realistic-fire-using-particles-in-3ds-max/
http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/autodesk-3ds-max/making-realistic-water-in-3ds-max/

Problems:

Solved by researching, The fix was to decrease certain iterations

- Shell modifier having to be applied to make planes visible with bitmaps on
- Having to decrease the segments on the water reactor to stop crashing
- Lowering the smooth iterations on my rocks to stop crashing
- Having to find suitable computers to render on for the 30+ hour rendering time