CPE 474 Final Project

"Forest Fever" is a culination of all the skills I learned from CPE474. It was a lot of fun (and pain), I'm happy how my effects came together. I learned that lighting can play a HUGE role in atmosphere. Ofter I would start with very bright scenes, which force the light to play a minor role. In this case I tried to reverse it and start with a dark setting. I also learned that a tiny bit of polish goes a long way. The particle systems all have glow at the beginning, and this really brings out the effect, especially in the case of the fire. The final biggest pain was that scripting events programmatically is painful. The amount of difficult and 'nasty code' involved makes animating them in Blender look like breeze. For future projects I will definitely take this path.

Technologies

• Particles Systems - My motto for this project was "Needs moar particle system." For my project 3 for CPE-474 I created a very customizable particle system so that it could be easily reused. After trying different sprites for the particles I realized that a multitude of unique effects could be created with very little effort. All the effects in the short are made with the same framework (i.e. there is no special handling for any of the particle systems). I was particularly proud of my particle system shooting particles system (or at least the illusion of it).
• Catmull-Rom Splines - Pathing is used heavily in this project. I used the general Path class I created for project 1. The pathing is used for the starting orb, the cameras path, controlling where the camera looks, and also the secret for creating my "particle system shooting particle system"
• Skinned Model - The ghosts are skinned on the GPU. In addition I created the entire rigged model and animations in Blender.
• Bloom - The bloom is a special bloom that does truncation to closest int rather than a smooth gaussian blur. I originally used the truncation method as a 'hack' for gaussian blut, but after implementing a legitimate gaussian blur, I found that the blur was TOO smooth and lead to a boring effect (even playing with the variance values nothing looked quite as satisfying).