December 16, 2025
For my final project, I wanted to create a video incorporating some of the best elements of all of my previous projects from this year. I took inspiration from Frozen II where Elsa sees visions made of ice crystals.
In order to create this effect, I created a crystal shader that I used as the material for all of the objects in the scene. I played around a lot with different settings of the shader to add random color variation and the color shift over time. I created a single crystal model that I instanced over the surface of the meshes. For the trebuchet and the dominos I applied the crystal shader directly to the models in order to preserve detail.
Inspiration
I took inspiration from this scene in Frozen II. The way that the objects formed out of the crystals was really interesting to me, and I wanted to see if I could recreate a similar effect. Similarly to how they did it in Frozen II, I chose to have a completely black background so that the crystals wouldn’t get lost in the background geometry.
Frames from my Animation
The Planets
I recreated a basic solar system to serve as a reference to our first project of the year.
Treasure Chest
I imported the model I created for our treasure chest modeling project. When I created the treasure chest, there was some complex geometry and relationships that were causing problems for the crystal system, so I simplified the treasure chest to just the basic outline for this project.
Bouncing Ball
I took a sphere and added drivers for the x and y scales to automatically adjust when I changed the z scale. I then key framed the z scale as the ball moved.
Trebuchet
One of my favorite parts of my Rube Goldberg project was the trebuchet that I used to launch a bowling ball. The original Trebuchet Model was taken from here. I made a few modifications to the model for this project, and I completely removed the rope attaching the ball to the trebuchet because my cloth simulation was going absolutely crazy when I imported it to the final project scene.
Dominos
While the actual domino project was one of the worst projects I’ve ever had at W&M (joking… kind of), I really liked the effect of a bunch of dominos falling. I created the domino snowflake by hand in another file, then I baked the physics to keyframes. This allowed me to import them into my final project without worrying about the physics simulator breaking or behaving weirdly. I wanted the dominos to fall because something actually hit them, so I came up with the idea to have the ball explode into a million crystals (which took forever to render). I wanted some really vibrant colors during the domino scene, so I boosted the saturation and went animated through the whole hue slider in my crystal shader.