Today’s chess video

This is very original!  ”This video is my final project for my DTC 335 class at Washington State University – Vancouver in the Fall 2014 semester. The goal was to make a two minute video utilizing chess pieces that we modeled earlier in the semester.

I used Autodesk Maya 2014 to model and render the objects in the video. After I was done with animating, I rendered the video as an IFF image sequence. I compiled the image sequence in Adobe After Effects where I added audio and exported the final version of the video.

I was going for something that was funny at first, but when I started searching for and collecting audio, I also wanted to make the fighting in the video somewhat stylized. I attempted this by making the pieces do stylistic kind of attacks and synchronizing it to the music. I also used deformers to animate the breathing earlier in the video and for the queens nodding to each other. This took me a while to figure out as Maya was not allowing me to animate the deformers the way their instructions say it should work. For the baby’s arm and hand, I made rigged up a skeleton with IK (inverse kinematic) handles.

My video turned out better than I had expected. But unfortunately there are a few easily visible errors in it. One of these errors is that during the into camera pan in, you can see the baby’s arm suspended above the chessboard. Another mistake was that I have a spotlight shining against the background which highlights a specific part of it and doesn’t look right.”