Day 173

This was far from the most complex scene I've made but the above image is probably my favorite one I've made so far. I didn't talk about all the steps of making the previous video since I wanted the sword reveal to be a surprise. Finn's sword was pretty easy to make and was made from simple shapes. For the nicks in the blade, I made small cubes and placed them where the nicks should be. Then I was able to subtract the small cubes from the blade to create the nicks. This type of action is known as a boolean operation which is a math term but it fits. You can subtract, add or get the difference between shapes. 

Next I needed a background image. I looked for an actual picture of the Ice King's lair from the show but those usually had characters in it too. I eventually found this pattern on an Ice King wallpaper which I liked. So I set up the background and ground and made them reflective since they should be like ice. I created two lights which are the red dots above. One is ambient to fill the scene with light and the other is a point light to generate the shadow. The shadow is too sharp but I was ok with it. Gunther's reflection on the wall didn't have a shadow though so I had to change some settings to fix that. This probably added a fraction of a second to the rendering time per frame which isn't bad but this video had 600 frames so it adds up. Lastly, I added a glow to the sword which looks nice in the top frame. Glow is a little finicky though and doesn't always act as expected. When making a single image, it's easy to see the results and change if needed. Unfortunately, you can't check every frame in a long movie so the sword doesn't consistently glow and flickers too. This was supposed to be a quick exercise so I didn't mind.