Scene One - Light & Sound

I was happy with the Old mans walk because it gave the scene a sense of distance and comedy as he slowly disappeared from one hill and re-appeared over the next. The scene now needed some light effects. The first light I would need is the light coming from the fire in the house. The light would need to fade away as if the fire wood runs out.

My original idea was to put a flickering omni light directly inside the house by changing the noise levels, this i thought would look more like a flame and the light would only escape through the window, but this didn't end up looking very good. Firstly I couldn't get the flicker to light up just the inside of the house and secondly the flicker was too extreme. I needed more of a glow so I put an omni light just inside the window and gave it an orange tint. I also Checked the 'Far Attenuation Use box' so that the light was only concentrated around the the window area. Next I used the Auto key and raised the multiplier up and down to give a glowing fire effect. This was simple but it looked far more effective than the flicker.

Next I wanted to add lightning to my scene this would be done by first looking for a thunder and rain sound effect. While going through some samples on the web I found a nice clear thunder sound and a good rain effect. I wanted to loop the thunder and also match the volumes of the samples so I opened up Adobe Soundproof and produced one wav file which would act are my weather sound effects if all of my scenes.



Once I had loaded the file into the Curve editor I could start to add my lightning. First I added a omni light in the sky above the scene and set the multiplier to zero. Next I ran my animation and watched when the waves on the track editor got larger, this would tell me the best frame for me to give a burst of light from the omni using the auto key and the multiplier. I wanted to make the lightning and thunder to look as violent as possible so it would look like the Old man is haven't to go out in the worst weather ever!



Lastly I imported my lamp model and linked it the mans hand so it followed him across the scene. The lamp also had the noise flicker effect but which the introduction of the lightning the scene was to busy with flashing lights so I decided to stick to a simple white light which showed the off the movement of the Old mans body better. I also animated the the door opening, this was easily done because i used a pivot door when making the house model. One problem I had with my lamp is that the super gizmo with the fire effect had disappeared and I'm not to sure why or how to get it back. I tried re-setting it with higher setting but it still didn't show up??