Midterm Production

I decided to start with the actual board, since that seemed to make the most sense to me. I created a simple NURBS plane and then expanded it to fill the grid. I then applied a lambert and the 'checker' 2D surface. The default grid is black and white, which would have looked fine, but I wanted to make it look a bit more like the chessboard I found and posted in my pre-production post, so I edited the colors a bit to reflect that. I also added another plane around the edge of the grid for a border.

This is what it looks like with the board and the black rook I've already created:

I then duplicated the rook 3 times, and added the texture for the white pieces. Then I made the pawns and did the same. This is the result:

Next I made the bishops. This was the most difficult piece yet because of the slit that bishops have in their top. I made the piece like normal using the CV curve and revolve tools, and then I had to do some research to make the slit. I watched this Youtube video that showed how to use the Boolean Difference tool to make it. I did that, then I had to figure out how to use the NURBS version of the tool. It wasn't too difficult, and now I've got bishops that look pretty realistic:

My next piece was the queen. It didn't really cause any trouble at all and was nothing new, so I'm just going to post the picture:

I then made the king. It was a little more complicated than the others but still not terrible. I first made the piece with a flat top using the CV curve and revolve tools, then to make the cross on top I used two cubes and transformed them to look like a cross. 

The last piece I had to make was the knight. I was specifically holding off on the knight until last because I knew it would be the most difficult piece to make. All of the other pieces are cylindrical and symmetrical, so using the CV tool and Revolving worked perfectly. The knight is a little different. I drew the outline of the horse like normal, except I drew the curve all the way around. Then I duplicated it and used the Loft tool to make the outline. This left me with the outline of the knight, and I only need to fill in the hole. I learned that I had to convert my NURBS object to a polygon. I followed these two tutorials:

• Convert NURBS surfaces to a polygon mesh
• Fill holes in a polygon mesh

This gave me the horse, but I still needed the base. For this I used the CV and revolve tools like normal, which gave me a round base, Then I positioned the horse on top of the base. I wanted to combine these objects beyond simply grouping them, since they will never be separated and should really be one object. I found a tutorial on combining polygons, so I had to convert my NURBS base into a polygon and then use this tutorial: Combine polygon meshes

I ended up with a pretty decent result that fits in with the rest of my set:

The only thing left for me to do is camera and lighting work. I made a camera and looked through it, then simply set keyframes while moving the camera around. Then I smoothed out the animation on the animation graph. For lighting I just added a couple spotlights. Then I batched rendered and made the sequence into a video, which is below.

I had a really fun time making this project. A lot went right, and there was never a time where I felt frustrated or lost. I'm really satisfied with the models I made. The only thing I would really change is the lighting. I feel that with enough time I could alter the lighting to make the pieces really look great. In the future I would like to maybe animate the pieces to make a full game of chess.