Staff Animation Blog - 01

Animation blog one
Hey guys, welcome to the first Magic Staff animation blog! I will be posting multiple of these as time goes on, and as I progress.
 
For this project, we were given pretty much entire creative license. At the start of the trimester, I thought it would be really cool to get a helmet like the one the bad guy in The Witcher 3 (CD Projekt Red, 2016), (all spiky, etc.), and animate it to become futuristic.
However, as I progressed throughout the trimester, I found myself become disillusioned about this idea. So, I went ahead, trawled google images for ideas. And google, with its wonderful advertiser ID, showed me a magic staff from RuneScape. Now, it looked pretty horrible, which is to be expected, as it came from RuneScape (Jagex, 2016), but it got me thinking. Thus, I began sourcing all sorts of photos on magic staves, from films, movies and some book covers! One thing I found, I love Dragon Age Inquisitions staff work, that is fine stuff right there.
Once I had a fair smorgasbord of pictures, I began 3D modelling, just to test the actually ‘doability’ of this. Turns out, your basic staff is pretty simple.
So far, I have the staff base (a cylinder, nothing special), a kind of gold filigree…thing (I got a helix spline, fattened it and made it fit the staff base), and a crystal on top. One thing that’s annoying me at the moment is that the crystal looks weird no matter how I size it. If I make it small, it looks puny, but if I make it large it dominates the staff and looks unrealistic. Im gonna have to experiment with this!
That’s my progress so far. Im sorry, I cant show screenshots this week, due to computer weirdness, but I promise they will arrive next week.
Have fun!
Peter Carey
Dracon Interactive



References:

CD Projekt Red. (2016). The Witcher 3 [Game]. n.p.: Bandai Namco Entertainment.

Jagex. (2016). Runescape [Game]. n.p.: Jagex.