Milestone 2A
When I approached this milestone, I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to create for my final submission. I knew I wanted something in the scene to glow, and I also wanted to create a sense of immersion. But I also knew that with my inexperience in using Unreal and in creating textures, I couldn’t try and create a scene where the background was way too difficult for me to finish. At first a lot of my ideas were like this, such as where I wanted to create an old-fashioned house with some lighting (either by a fire or a magical glow), or the point where I wanted to create a flying character moving towards the foreground and interacting with the scenery (like dodging a tree). Because of this, it took me a while to come up with an idea that was both easy enough for me to complete in the time frame while also meeting the requirements I had set for myself.
In the end, what I decided to create ended up being a combination of all the ideas I had had. After researching some flying characters to see if I could animate the movement the way I wanted, I came across fairies and my idea was born - to create a magical forest scene where glowing fairies are flying around and potentially interacting with the forest (such as flying around the tree, or landing on a leaf). This way, I could make a simplistic background and focus on the movement and glow of the fairies, while still adding some further effects if I wanted (or have the time to), such as fog, or a lantern light.
After some further research, I came across a few images similar to what I had in mind to create. The closest to my scene is this:
While the overall glow effect and rough design of the fairies I want to create is pretty close to this:
So with this in mind, I started to make some rough animations of the fairies. I decided to make one which would be seen in the foreground with more details and a form, while the ones in the mid and background would just be a glowing orb with wings. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of time to work on the animations up to this point, so I’ve only got a rough movement of the foreground fairy and movement of the body and wings of the background fairies. They look like this:
I also didn’t get time to look into glow effects and to work in Unreal, but I hope to make different colours for the fairies and to perhaps intensify and dull their glow. Next week I hope to finalise the movement and wing animation for both fairies and to start work on the 3D scene.
