Creating Stereoscopic 3D Images

Recreating Cameras and Lights in Maya

Extra Credit: Lighting a Scene in Maya

Special Effects in Animation and Live-Action

My first two term paper scores were 90 and 87; I will not be writing a third term paper.

Outline for the Third Term Paper

• Introduce special effects their purpose, examples, and forced perspective
• Define forced perspective
• Explain why I chose forced perspective
• Introduce the two movies I am comparing
• Harry Potter
• Lord of the Rings
• Lord of the rings introduction
• Why forced perspective was used
• How forced perspective was done in lord of the rings
• Effectiveness of the effect
• Harry Potter introduction
• Why and where forced perspective was use in harry potter
• How it was done and if the technique was different than LOTR
• How effective the effect was
• Comparison of the two movies' attempt at forced perspective
• my favorite/most effective in my opinion
• Conclude as to why its better to use forced perspective than some effect
• explain the differences in each movies techniques
• recap what movie did it better

Stop-Motion Character Animation

I made this stop-motion animation the same way I made my last one. I had my character on a popsicle stick from a tasty corndog then used photoshop to remove the stick and my sexy arm from the pictures. The shadows once again play a difficult role of a uniform background after removing my arm and the stick.  I feel however the animation is more life like than my last.

I also used tape to mark jump heights so that at the apex of the jump I could remember where to rotate the character in the air and make him hang for effect.

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction

The law of conservation of energy states that the total energy cannot change instead it is conserved. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but can change form such as chemical to kinetic or potential to kinetic.  In video games this is a common phenomenon calculated by the physics engine in regards to collisions and the damage of an explosion.  In some cases however the laws are broken to bring the illusion of magic or perhaps cut corners on the engine itself to save money.  In the games Watch Dogs and Archeage Online their fantasy worlds bend the law conservation of energy for the sake of magic or immersion.

In the real world conservation of energy is seen in everyday life.  An object falling from the sky has maximum potential energy when released, as it falls it converts that potential energy into kinetic as it falls. In explosions there is also a change from potential chemical energy into kinetic energy of shrapnel and then of course heat is an expression of the chemical energy as well.  These laws of course would be somehow illustrated in video games but bended depending on the level of fiction the game depicts.  The particular phenomenon I focused on was conservation of energy in the x direction of a 2D plane (something moving from right to left). In Archeage the game revolves around magic in a mideval sort of steam-punk setting and for magic to work physics must not, and in Watch Dogs you are depicted as a hero but still human and as such most laws of physics should be accepted.

Looking at Archeage in regards to the conservation of energy the mounted animals used for transportation, they do not function like how the conservation of energy says they should.  When you are riding your mount and then desummon it, it disappears but all energy is not conserved.  Since the mount is moving the rider it should both of them should have the same kinetic energy.  When the mount is removed though the rider does not continue and instead hops off right on the spot where it was desummoned as if they were not moving in the first place. This breaks the law of conservation of energy and energy is not conserved strictly because the developers decided to cut corners about just why the rider does not continue to move in the same direction.

Within the game Watch Dogs a similar phenomenon is witnessed.  In a crash with a citizen the cars don't transfer the proper amount of kinetic energy to the car they are colliding with.  This is for ease of gameplay and to make the game more fun and less of paying your health insurance deductible and more playing the game. If they actually calculated the energy transfer it would be obvious since a collision at a high rate of speed would render a car immobile.  It can be seen that this is not the case.  In a normal collision the kinetic energy of both cars is transferred to each other, however the one with more kinetic energy will hit the other harder and further.  In Watch Dogs the structural integrity and the amount of energy transferred to the player's car is minimal and not at all realistic.  It is as if a sedan has the structural integrity of  semi when hitting a car visibly bigger than it.

Also in Watch Dogs the same can be seen with motorcycles.  When driving at lethal speed on a motorcycle there is a good chance that upon a collision even with a brick wall the player will remain on the bike.  I have no idea why the developers did not polish the physics better it doesn't feel immersive, just an obvious bug in the game and in fact it ruined their reviews.  In a real world situation the amount of energy transferred from the player and rider should be all of it since the bike stops dead. A human is not strong enough to transfer his energy gained from riding the motorcycle to the motorcycle, so he should continue his movement which in turn brings up the concept of momentum.  Watch Dogs does not seem to care about these basic laws and the player has his kinetic energy trumped in the process.

There are many games that violate the laws of energy.  These are just a couple examples of some very obvious and unexplained phenomenons that sometimes even saying "it's magic" doesn't cut it.  Watch Dogs is set in future Chicago, there shouldn't be any magic.  In all cases in the real world energy is conserved, it must how be given off such as heat, or transferred to another object. In these three cases this is not witnessed. In some cases it is for effect but these examples also did not depict that. They were all limitations of the physics engine that is running the game's physics.  Computers and especially in games there are limitations as to what you can do with your physics engine. In Archeage there are a few hundred people playing at once.  If your computer decided to flawlessly render all physics for a small percentage of that population let alone the whole server population it would break. In video games this is the most common case of violating a law of physics.