Final Project: Chess

5/13/2022: I worked with Melanie on creating this final project about a chess game.

In this game, one of the sides (black) is winning. However, there are no human players, but instead, the pieces each control themselves. The black queen goes on a rampage and keeps taking out the last remaining white pawns. However, there is one white pawn she overlooks and eventually, it is able to reach the end of the board and get promoted to a queen. The black queen is in the perfect position to stop a checkmate from happening, but she is not even paying attention, and starts to attack the pawn right in front of the white king. This pawn stands up to her and stops her one space ahead of it. It points over at the newly promoted white queen and the black queen gets hit with shock and "melts" in anger and disbelief. The last 3 white pieces then celebrate.

Rendered Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw6Uy-m-ve0 (link also included for quick and easy access)

More on this animation:

The modeling was mainly handled by Melanie using the above reference image, whereas I was mostly focused on the keyframing. We both contributed to the lighting. Most of this animation went very smoothly and the issues that we had were always related to lighting. We tried a spotlight first, to mimic a closely lit chess game in a dark room, but it only emitted enough light to make the pieces visible when I had it set to 10,000 or more. The black pieces would usually look good with our lighting, but the white would look grainy and bleached. When we turned the lighting down, then the dark pieces would be hard to see. I tried making the black pieces a bit lighter and the white pieces a bit darker, but not too much or they would blend in with their squares. We eventually settled on area and directional lights and these worked out well. When rendering, the grainy problem persisted with the white pieces and the only fix I could find was setting 'diffuse' to 0 (this was rendered in Arnold). We tried multiple diffuse settings but no matter how high we set it, the pieces were still grainy. We also tried improving the less direct lighting, but that also did not fix the problem. Lastly the saved images after rendering did not look the same as in the render view, so I applied an ACES color output to the video using DaVinci Resolve. Without doing this, the black pieces and brown squares looked almost the same.