River Boat
Project 3: Motion Path Ride
Colin Wright 3/19/2019
Final Animation
Story Board
Inspiration and Process
I decided I wanted to do a row boat traveling down a river at night. I chose this because I thought it would be a good opportunity to experiment with a low light environment and I could do some cool lighting effects with lights coming from objects in the scene. Just having a boat going through a scene seemed like it might be boring so I decided I'd do a collision with a rock which knocks the boat off course and down a waterfall. I modeled most of the scene, then implemented the water using a boss simulation to create subtle waves, created the water fall with n particles, created the grass with x-gen, and animated the objects in the scene including the boat path.
Models
Trees - Turbo squid (I added textures)
Train - Turbo squid ( I added windows and textures)
Fish - Turbo squid (added textures)
Everything else I modeled
Problems
There are a bunch of errors in the second render that I could probably fix with a third render. The bridge looks like its not one polygon, the boat disappears for two frames, the water turns black, weird stuff happens when the boat gets to the waterfall, the camera is a little shaky when following the bats, etc. I also wanted to add stars to the sky. YouTube made the video much darker after uploading
Some "Disney 12 Principals" employed
Anticipation: After the boat hits the rock there is a brief pause and some rocking. Then the boat is knocked off course causing it to accelerate towards the waterfall.
Staging: I used different camera aims to control the audiences eyes. I tried to get a shot of the first two homes and then had the camera follow the bats. The bats flight ended where the train starts to travel across the bridge. The train leads to the hill where the audiences watches before the boat strikes the rock. (this was supposed to create the effect of not paying attention where you're going).
Timing: The boat travels faster down the water fall and progressively faster as it approaches the fast moving water near the waterfall.
Appeal: The lights hopefully look nice reflected in the water and make the scene feel inviting.
