Assignment: Create Your Own Vision of Hades

Now that you’ve worked through this process with a demonstration file, it’s time to create your own vision of the underworld. You can either begin with the half-finished file you worked over at the beginning of the chapter and make it your own, or you can start from scratch and let your imagination run wild.

Your final painting should contain the following elements, all of which you learned to set up in this chapter:

• Five more layers of information that can be placed on planes at different depths in space.
• A ground plane onto which you can project an image to be used as the base of the project.
• Moving figures. You can use the footage provided on the DVD that you used in the demo project. If you have access to a video camera, consider dressing up some of your friends and creating your own scene.

In the animation phase of the project, challenge yourself to do the following:

• Set up your project so that all elements on the same plane are contained in precomps. Add animation to the elements in the precomps.
• Use fractal noise to add motion to water, smoke, or lava. It’s a very efficient way to add motion to elements without the overhead of video footage.
• Add some video footage to your projects in the precomps. Some elements, like fire, can’t be done well with fractal noise, and you’ll have to add video footage to create the effect convincingly.
• Animate the sky. Based on what was demonstrated in this chapter, break the sky into layers, and animate the layers against each other to bring life to the clouds.