Midterm Project -



The idea of my midterm project was to create a maple seed designed with a circle and an ellipse. The seed would be animated to rotate, and then rotate around itself in a spiral. Once this was accomplished, I planned to make the seed into an array, so the seed could be produced many times. As the seed would be twirling around, the scale function could be used to give the illusion of the seed falling through space. This effect might also work by changing the color slightly with every revolution, making the seeds recede into the background. Adding some maple leaves in various shades of green and red would complete the autumn scene.

I had hoped to add some user interaction into the project. I wanted to tie the creation of the seeds to mouse button action. It would have been nice to develop a wind effect as well, so a user could “blow” the seeds from side to side by moving the cursor.

I had a really frustrating time working on this project. I failed completely to move beyond the most basic steps. I managed to get the seed to rotate, but then could never get it to spiral. It seemed to me that in order to get the action that I desired I would need two rotate functions. When I added the second function (the spiral) to the first (spin), it always failed to work as I anticipated. If I had something approaching a spiral, the seed’s rotation would disappear. It was maddening. Adding in the leaf pattern (created in Illustrator) made the seed look a little strange because it was not as well rendered. The levels of detail or abstraction didn’t match, making the entire piece feel disjointed.

Link to MidTermProject