Title Sequence- 02

Initially, I had the idea to have two people playing, with one losing his temper and overturning the board. I decided against this, as it would prove too complicated to rig two characters in the timescale available. I went with my second idea which was much more simple but overall just as effective. The idea was to give a sense of chaos and messiness, starting with a camera angle in the centre of the two players, to show no bias. The chaotic element is a reflection of my own experience of playing competitive games, where I often imagine all the possibilities of moves available, and this can get into a chaotic jumble in my mind.


I experimented with dynamic movement as it was not something that I was very confident with, and I wanted to develop my skills in the area. During the initial tests the dice wouldn’t react as I’d hoped which led to some quite bizarre effects such as dice accelerating back the way they’d come. This was frustrating, and I ended up deleting the effects that were in place, and started again. During this second experiment I discovered that tampering with the gravity setting had led to the unwanted effects. I settled on using the default gravity settings, which seemed to function much more as expected. The movement of the chess pieces would be a result of the impact of the dice, using a dynamics body tag.
I modelled all of the pieces manually, which led to some pieces not turning out as hoped. The knight, for example, I had three different versions of at one point, and the best result looks more like a seahorse. It was difficult to create a knight that looked how I wanted, even after using visual references of real horses and other chess pieces.
I struggled with the King piece’s crown until I found useful visual reference material. To create the cross, I made one of the arms, and then triplicated the piece in order to maintain symmetry.
All of the pieces are basically variations on the first piece I created, which was the pawn, except for the knight, which was modelled fresh.