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                                                                   Figure 1. First Outside Scene
     I took colors I thought would fit sand and dirt that also had sun shining on it. Ending up with different hues of orange and yellow. I knew that the environment was a harsh one brought about by war so I thought maybe the sky should be black. That black being the fallout of bombs so it got everywhere and the sand is covering it for the most part. I have each piece of this scene separated into their own layers on Gimp, a program similar to photoshop. What I found interesting drawing out each of these elements in Gimp on layers is that even though my drawing skills aren’t great, if you play with gradients and highlights and stack things on top of each other it turns out decent, to me anyways. I would go on to do this method for the rest of my scenes since it gives me a scene to work with later for movement and animations in an efficient manner. 

 

 

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                 Figure 2. Gimp Visual

 

 

 

 

 

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               Figure 3. Outside Scene 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

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                                                                      Figure 4. Outside Scene 3
     I had to spend some time figuring out how to implement a lightning effect from the program Houdini. A student who was in my class at my table told me how After Effects can be used to bring such visuals to my composition. So I exported EXR files of an old project I worked on with lightning and imported it into After Effects to see how it acted. To my relief the lightning itself was the only thing that showed up. After learning this I went ahead and uploaded all my drawings from Gimp into separate compositions on After Effects. Also due in part to the puppet tool the same student told me about, it lets you manipulate the image and animate the position of the pins you put on it. Combining the puppet tool and how After Effects doesn’t fill in the negative space of imported Gimp Images. I managed to make a moving image that's layered properly and aren’t destructive to each other. I found something super helpful where you could make changes to the images on Gimp and save it over the previous image and it would automatically upload that new image in the After Effects project. It was almost like the programs were talking to each other and knew what was wanted by the artist. That was my impression anyways. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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                      Figure 5. Lightning FX Test 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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                                                                    Figure 6. After Effects Puppet Tool
     Afterwards I needed to design my lightning EXR’s to be integrated with the scene as if it was a part of it. It took some time to brainstorm how I can achieve this effect but I eventually came upon a tutorial of how this guy who recreated a scene of his live action footage inside of blender and used the same camera positioning to blend the distances between elements to make the recreated 3D scene and the live action footage seamless. From there he would create effects on blender on the ground and the object his live footage collides with and that’s how he integrated his effects into his live footage, after exporting those images into After Effects and cutting out an opacity of specific parts of his live footage. This helped me understand that nature of the exporting processes from 3D programs. I learned If I replicate what he did and recreated the scene with simple shapes on Houdini I can achieve the same seamlessness that he did and just export the images and import them into After Effects. 

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                                                     Figure 7. Houdini Scene Replication and Lightning FX
     In Houdini I animated the frames to make each lightning only showing for a brief moment and at random times to give that unpredictable lightning appearance of real life. I realized though that even though I got my lightning in the right positions and animated it still wasn’t blending into the scene and that was because it wasn’t interacting with the environment. I went ahead and layered the clouds I had in the scene over the lightning and went back into Gimp and added several layers of lights that imitated the lightning light reflection off the clouds. After I obtained these lights in the form of images with negative space I imported them into After Effects and Animated them to only show up exactly when each lightning effect appears. This made the illusion of the lightning interacting with the environment and ultimately blended well with the scene. 

 

 

 

 

 

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                                                              Figure 8. Lightning FX Integration Outcome
     After I got my lightning down to show off Houdini and what I learned with it and after finishing animating each scene in After Effects I still needed to add more effects. What I needed was the sand winds and campfire effects. The program I turned to is called Wallpaper Engine on the Steam store. This program has prebuilt effects that you can add in a live 3D space, like a game but for art imports. The reason why I didn’t make these effects myself is that it takes a lot of research and development in Houdini to make them and I didn’t have the time. I wanted to be able to finish a project telling a story or a piece of it and experiment with things I learned from UTD rather than doing a full blown production which is unreasonable I think for me. But also the tools of this program is nothing to dismiss casually I believe. 
    

 

 

 

 

 

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                                                                  Figure 9. Wallpaper Engine FX
     It actually made it easy for me to place everything I have in one place without dealing with the complexities of After Effects too much. What I did was export videos of my After Effect scenes with the puppet animations and the Houdini lightning added. Then I would import them into Wallpaper Engine. The engine also recognizes the negative space of art from Gimp and After Effects and doesn’t fill it in which is fantastic. From here I would import the foreground assets that do not have puppet animation on After Effects as separate images on Wallpaper Engine. I would then proceed to animate them on the engine itself since it has its own animation controls. This program allowed me to see all the effects and animations in real time without rendering since it's being played on a loop in a 3D game-like environment. It really allowed me to see how things worked together as well as see what each frame would show in real time, to see if there are any mistakes I need to fix.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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                                                              Figure 10. Wallpaper Engine FX #2
     What I did from here is export several videos with the effects I added on Wallpaper Engine of the scenes and put them into Davinci Resolve. This is where I can edit the rough durations of each scene I had laid out as videos. I cut the videos and added transitions that I saw were appropriate. Nothing too complicated here just making sure the lengths of each shot how I wanted it and so forth. Pretty similar to the skills I obtained from my video editing course I'm sure. But there was another step to my project that I implemented that made it more immersive which are the sounds. 

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                   Figure 11. Davinci Resolve Video Layout

     For a couple of years before I started on my capstone project I experimented with music on Fruity Loops Studio a digital music and recording program of sorts. I knew I wanted my project to have music of some kind have an impact on it. At first I was thinking of making a music video animation taking place in space based on the song by TheFatRat called “MAYDAY feat. Laura Brehm,” where it's a motherly figure out in space looking to find a home and is then called upon by a civilization of smaller beings to be as such. Another one was where a killer hunted you down but in a soothing environment and sort of psychedelic. But I went with this tale taking place during Biblical times. Since I was creating everything besides some effects and some sound effects I’ll mention about here soon I thought I would also create my own music. I substantially wanted to create something of my own music-wise so here was my chance to do it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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                                                             Figure 12. Fruity Loops Project Music
     This process actually took a substantial amount of time testing out different instruments, sounds and tunings to produce the music I have in the video. I took the suggestions from my classmates in my seminar class and went for that ambience music but I added a little bit of a unique voice to it as well I suppose. If I achieved that or not is up to you all. What I faced though was the timing of certain sounds coming about at certain moments. I wanted the music to also be integrated seamlessly into the story or flow of the visuals. I finished the length of the video on the Davinci Resolve Program and played both the video and this song with certain instruments playing in a patterned loop at the same time. Then I went and manually put in different notes for one instrument at specific parts of the video that I wanted the notes to play at and recorded it into the song on Fruit Loops Studio. I repeated this way of recording to time the audio and notes I wanted for specific time codes on Davinci Resolve and imported the music.

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     The final thing I added were the sound effects of the wind, cave and campfire. For some of the effects I found royalty free high quality sound effects but the one I cared the most for were the wind effects because it could make or break the project at this stage. Since it covers the whole project. I didn’t want it to be overtaking the other elements of the project or be too low quality to where it breaks the immersion. Luckily I found a great website called MyNoise.net. This website has a wind sound generator that lets you in real time change the high quality wind noise. Basically it allowed me to make cave wind sounds, the sand winds, and the calm winds at the end easily. After I gathered my sound effects I just added them to my Davinci Resolve project and edited their durations and transitions and finished off my project for export.