NEMESIS
A Senior Project
by Madeline Pittman
EFFECTS
Torch Fire
I began work on the torch by slowly layering in detail. I wanted to block in the basic movement first, modifying the flame height, source geometry, and fuel in order to shape the emission the way I wanted. The result was test #1; the flame was very straight and vertical, and the way the fuel was set up wasn't quite correct, as an inferno forms in the middle of the simulation. I then played around with the density of the flames and using turbulance to disturb the flame above the torch. I also used the torch as a static object and added temperature to it in order to excite the flames upward. After many little tweaks, I arrived at test #2, and test #3 is a higher resolution version of the second one. My final version of the flame is the same as test #3, only with a better sense of what the lighting will be like.
ANIMATION
Sarcophagus
The animation on the sarcophagus was pretty straight-forward; I used a transform node to get the rotation downward. I utilized the keyframes I had from the animatic, but I tweaked the animation so it was less jerky. I initially had some problems with my 3D textures swimming, but adding the placement nodes into the same transform fixed the issue.
I'm not much of an animator, but I wanted to animate the bone wings of the mummy and have Nemesis come forward out of the sarcophagus, which was suggested by the class. The mummy is a combination of a transform and a lattice deform, since I didn't want her to have much complex movement. The wings are separate pieces in a hierarchy of transform nodes, and are keyframed individually. In general, I wanted it to look like she was crawling from the sarcophagus using her wings. I wanted them to twitch and flail awkwardly since she hasn't used them in thousands of years.