Short Animation
Final Project
May 13, 2022
Animation
Thank you to Dr. Davis for teaching this class! And thank you for teaching me in a number of other classes during my time at William & Mary. You have inspired me and my classmates in many ways and prepared us for our futures in CS. I can't believe my senior year is coming to a close, and I look forward to life after graduation. Thank you for being an integral part of my experience in the CS department!
Story Boards & Written Descriptions
It's graduation weekend, and W&M is ready to place the senior class gift paver into the sidewalk by the statue of James Monroe. A W&M ball drives a golf cart with the granite paver. He stops and knocks the paver from the back seat. Then he jumps on the paver to push it in place. Finished, he returns to the golf cart and drives away.
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How many seniors in the class of 2022 participated?
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100%
Frames from Animation
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Explanations
 The entire scene is enclosed by a sphere polygon, whose interior is shaded blue (for the blue sky) |  The portion of the sidewalk around the Sunken Gardens is represented by a green plane (representing the ground) suspended within the sphere |  A closer look at the sidewalk and foliage |
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 The tree (leaves created with MASH) |  Bushes created with MASH |  The long drive... |
 The golf cart is prepared to drive. A driver camera is placed over the ball to capture the first scene |  The James Monroe statue from a distance |  Statue created entirely with cube and sphere polygons whose vertices were rearranged with soft selection |
 Comparing the statue with my reference image |  Creating the leg by moving vertices |  The golf cart with lighted headlamps |
 Front view of golf cart |  View of the back of the golf cart |  The steering wheel |
 Understanding the Herringbone brick pattern |  Originally, I planned to "knock" bricks away to place the paver into the sidewalk. I took this picture on campus the day after LDOC as a study. Later during the animation process, I realized that this would be unnecessary since the ball could jump to "push" the paver into place |  Building the herringbone pattern brick-by-brick |
 Multiplying rows to make a sidewalk (no MASH). Final sidewalk consisted of 200 rows, 16 bricks per row |  Class year hidden at the beginning of the sidewalk. These last four years has been a journey! |  Reference image I took of the site |
 One of the plants (created with MASH) |
Additional Notes
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When I first started rendering, each frame took over 3 minutes to render. This animation consists of 1200 frames, which would have amounted to approximately 60 hours. So, I adapted my animation. To reduce the number of hours, I rendered the first 300 frames (driving down the sidewalk) without raytracing since the shadows were not visible from the driver's perspective anyway. For the remaining frames, I restricted the angles of the camera and removed all extraneous objects, including the buses, the tree, and the statue. With raytracing, these last frames took a little over 24 hours to render. In total, the entire animation took 27 hours, not including the time it took to fix mistakes and start over.
Sources
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Audio:
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Electric golf cart: https://quicksounds.com/library/sounds/golf-cart
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Clunks: iMovie audio