Master Hand v. Zwei

My original idea for this project came from Master Hand in Super Smash Bros for the Nintendo 64. I wanted to model a fight with Master Hand. I assumed the most difficult part would be heirarchically modelling Master Hand itself/himself.

However, after I was able to do so, I found a new challenge in realistically animating Master Hand's opponent.

WASD   - Move the camera forward, left, backwards, right.

MOUSE - Moving the mouse modifies the direction the user looks, so the view follows the mouse.

n           - Display the Normals.

x           - Switch between Gourad and Phong Shading for Zwei. Zwei starts Gourad.

Q/E       - Move the location of the "sun" light left and right.

Master Hand is the final boss of the single player mode of the original Super Smash Bros. game for the Nintendo 64. He is legendary for being difficult to beat for young players playing against him/it for the first time.

Zwei is the ballistic puppy from RoosterTeeth's RWBY show. Mailed to the main character of the show in a poster tube, the cuddly canine has been fired out of a rocket launcher, been used as a baseball, and destroyed Mecha Suits and Monsters alike. He even has his own upbeat soundtrack!

I put together the framework to support a Master Hand that had multiple meshes. However, the hand mesh provided was pathetically low-poly, and just looked like a lump. So, while I tried to procure a proper mesh, I worked on shading the hand to make it look like it had the glove texture. Eventually, I received a proper hand mesh, and managed to put together a halfway decent unmoving hand.

The toughest part of working with the hand was the fact that the pieces came together in one file, so I couldn't first rotate and then move the fingers. I had to move the fingers to the location in which I thought they should rotate from, rotate them, and then move them to a position in which the motion looked relatively like it was from a glove and the hand didn't break apart. It took some time, but I figured it out.

Master Hand's initial opponent was a low-poly sphere. It took a lot of math (specifically calculus), as well as trial and error, to have the sphere attack Master Hand.

After that, I chose the dog mesh to be the opponent, which threw off my calculations by shooting everything up and to the right, meaning I had to go through the process all over again. It wasn't quite as grueling this time, but it wasn't easy.

At that point, the scene still felt boring, so I implemented a barrel roll in the dog, which I had taken to callin Zwei in homage to the dog from the show RWBY. This made my parabola seem unrealistic, so I once again redid my calculations, having to mess with all of the coefficients and vertices to create a realistic jumping animation

The first thing I displayed in the program was a diamond mesh. However, it was tilted rather than upright, so I had to experiment with various transforms for a lot of time until I could display it remotely upright. Had I not spent so much time on that, I might have been able to display a texture on it, but I did, so I ran out of time.

I chose to make the stage an amethyst to follow the color scheme of the Final Destination stage from the original Super Smash Bros. game without completely copying it.