Animation - Scene 3

The last scene of my animation required me to create a shuttle with 2 tie fighters as an escort and have them fly out of my Star Destroyer over to a larger fleet of Destroyers. I did this in a similar way to the group of tie fighters in the previous scene, importing the models in and scaling them appropriately.Then creating the motion path and changing the amount of frames that it would last for and changing the speed the shuttle flies at in the graph editor, I also had to adjust the position of the curve nodes occasionally using the 2D view modes. When I had finished the scene I realised that there was a bit of a problem, the tie fighters that arrived in the previous scene just stayed there at the end of the animation and the shuttle with its escort were already in view waiting to come out of the Star Destroyer in the distance. I solved this using Keyframes and the Hide function so that at the end of the fie fighters animation they would disappear and the shuttle and new fighters would appear this made the whole animation look a lot smoother. When I did a test animation of the final scene the hangar looked very dark and you could hardly make out any of the detail, so in order to fix this I inserted 2 point lights into the hangar to illuminate the detail as well as the shuttle when it was just leaving the hangar.

Animation - Scene 2

For my second scene I wanted a group of 3 tie fighters to fly in from off-screen and fly towards the Star Destroyer to which they then loop under the ship. I first imported my tie fighter into my scene and scaled it down according to how I felt it should look, once this was achieved I duplicated the model twice and made 2 of the fighters child objects of the main fighter that would be at the front using the Parent Constraint. The next part was to create the path that the fighters would fly along, I thought about which tool would be best for this and settled for a Bezier Curve as this would allow me to create nice curving paths around my Star Destroyer. I created a path that curved nicely round my ship and did a test run of the scene so far to see if I was pretty happy with it and I was, the only things I had to change was the speed of the fighters in the graph editor and the amount of frames that the animation would last for. One problem was the awkwardness of the Bezier Curve tool, it was quite difficult to create the nodes where I wanted them as it would often place them further along one axis than I wanted this led me using the 2D Orthographic view mode to align the nodes of the motion path better. After this it was simple to just attach the group of fighters to the motion path and then make the motion path a child of the Star Destroyer so that when the fighters arrived they would always be flying over the star destroyer instead of it leaving them behind.

Animation - Scene 1

Setting up the first scene was rather straightforward as it was just a Star Destroyer flying in a straight line for 7 seconds. In order to do this I thought the best way would be to use a motion path and then attach the Destroyer to it, then I adjusted the time that the motion would run for and opened up the graph editor and made it move at a constant speed by having a straight gradient. When it came to rendering the scene I had a minor problem, the animation screen was larger than what the scene view in Maya was showing me and the lighting looked a lot darker. I was not happy with this and had to tweak and re-render the scene 4 times before I got it how I wanted it to look. I am happy with the first scene in my animation so far and I see nothing that really needs changing.

In-Class Exercise 11 - Part 2

The second part of this task involved using Set Driven Keys (SDKs), this can be used to make the changing of one object effect another. This was rather simple to do, I created a cube and a sphere in my scene and then used the Set Driven Key tool to open up the menu, selecting the sphere first and set it to be the driver and then selected to cube and set it to be the driven object. I then set it so that when the sphere was moved along the X axis the cube would be rotated around the Y axis. I cannot really find much use for this tool in my animation however I can see its use in creating movements that are triggered by other objects.

In-Class Exercise 11 - Part 1

This exercise was to teach me about using Constraints to help create my animation. I set up a basic scene with 2 spheres and a cube in it, I then selected both the spheres and finally the cube and used a Point Constraint. This made it so that when I moved one of the spheres the cube would always move to be in the centre of the 2 spheres, I could see this coming in useful when I am setting up the cameras in my scene as I could have an object moving along a path and always have the camera moving along with it.

The next constraint type I used was the Aim Constraint, for this I added a sphere and a cylinder into my scene, selecting the sphere and then the cylinder I applied the aim constraint. This had the effect of whenever you moved the sphere the cylinder would rotate to always face the object. Initially though the wrong axis on the cylinder was trying to face the sphere simply changing the parameters on the constraint allowed me to change it to the correct axis. I will be using this tool for certain with my cameras as it will allow me to create a camera that will always focus on an object, overall this is a nice alternative to using the Camera and Aim.

The last constraint I decided to try out was the Parent Constraint, this is a simple tool that allows you to assign an object to another so that when the parent object is moved the child object will also move the same amount, the same goes for rotating and scaling. This tool will probably not be helpful for my animation as I feel as though it is much easier to use the Outliner to assign objects to each other.

In-Class Exercise 10

This exercise was all about Rigging and Skinning, for this task I was given a already made scene with a model of a human hand in it. My job was to use the rigging tools to create a skeleton for the hand using a series of joints position in realistic places withing the hand. I can see this tool being useful for making animations involving models with multiple moving parts such as an Imperial AT-AT moving, the Create Joints tool would be used to give the animator a large amount of control over how he animated the movement of the legs and the head. However I do not think that this tool will be useful for my animation as I do not have any moving parts on my models except the wings on my shuttle which I will probably animate a different way if I choose to make them move for my final animation. The second part of the task was to use Skinning, this is used to bind the skeleton I created to the mesh of the object so that when you edit the skeletons joints it will effect the mesh and move it accordingly. I found the skinning part rather difficult as is was hard to get the area that the skeleton affected to cover the exact area that it needed to which led to a deformed looking finger when I attempted to move the skeleton.

Making the Animation Scene

In order to create the scene that I would use for my animation I first created a sphere primitive and scaled it up by a fairly large amount, next I used the Reverse tool in order to switch the way the faces were visible. After this I assigned a new Surface Shader material to it, this is because this material is not affected by lighting effects which would lead to a nice even looking texture for my skybox.

The next thing to do was to create the sun that would be present in my scene, for this I created a basic sphere and scaled it up to how I wanted it. Then I went into the Lambert materials attributes and selected the advanced options for Incandescence and selected a Fractal, I then adjusted the colour balance to a nice orange to use as the base of colour for my sun. In the fractals attributes I adjusted the Amplitude, Ratio and Frequency Ratio to create black patches on the sun to simulate hot spots. I then checked the animate box to turn it into a more 'living' texture, after I had done this I also had to create an Expression in the Time and Threshold attributes.

The Threshold Expression (fractal1.threshold = 0.1 + noise(time) / 10;) was used to randomly alter the Threshold attribute over time making it appear is if the surface was moving and changing in my animation. The Time Expression (fractal1.time = time / 120;) allowed the texture to be animated based to the timelines time by updating the threshold stat every frame, the number that it is being divided by is used to speed up or slow down the animation. The last step in creating my sun was to go and add a particle effect, I switched from the Modelling preset to the FX preset, from here I selected my sun and went to Effects > Fire, this added a basic fire particle effect to my sun but it was not emitting correctly as all the fire particles would act like a normal flame and travel upwards. In order to resolve his I simply had to navigate to the gravity field that was attached to the particle effect and delete the expression that caused the particles to float upwards, after this the effects was nicely fit around my sun, all that was left to do was reduce the maximum amount of particles and I was finished. One problem I have with the effect though is the longevity of the particles, they appear and then disappear too quickly making the sun look like it has been sped up, I have not yet found a way to solve this problem and I can only hope that I find a solution soon as then I would be very happy with the quality of my sun.

The last thing my scene needed some lighting, I added a point light to my sun in order to light up the scene and also added in some lens flare that I tinted to  a more orange/red colour, this light was not sufficient however, I tried increasing the intensity of the light but it made my models far to bright so instead I opted for a weak ambient light so you could see the side of the ships not facing the sun.

After my scene was complete I simply imported all my models into the scene ready to start work on the animation.