Final Animation Part 4

After rendering the animation putting the scenes together the final animation is now complete. I am happy with what the final out come look like as it was similar to the idea I had when I first made my story board in weeks 3 and 4.

Overall I am happy with the quality of the animation. However I am disappointed not to have included more sound in the piece as that is what I wanted to achieve from the outset. This couldn't be achieved however with difficulties in the rendering making me concentrate on that more the the added effects to the animation. Also the sound I included in the piece didn't come out in the finished render, which was disappointing. the scene where there is a close up of R2D2 spinning his head would have been better if I had been able to include the sound effects of him panicking to go with it. That was meant to be a funny scene but without the sound it doesn't make much impact.

I am happy with the range of techniques I used, with the change of cameras to give the viewer more information like with the close up of the intecepter to emphasis the X-Wing spotting it. Also the quick change of camera in the same scene helps with the illusion of action in the animation.

I am happy with the animation itself also. Using a range of techniques from key frames in the final scene to motion paths used throughout the scene to connecting the ships to react to each other based on movements.

I think the lighting in the animation could have been better. This however was tricky to achieve as I had differing results on the same project by using the mac and windows on the same project. This meant the colour of the lights changed when switching computers and due to my home pc being a mac this was a problem I couldn't avoid.

Again a similar problem occurred with the environment sphere. The picture placed on it could transfer between computers and crashed the pc a couple of times. This was rectified in the rendering process as I had to change the sphere each render to get the effect I wanted.

Favourite scene: Close up on intecpeter

Had I had more time and a windows PC at home I think I could have made a better final product then I have. However that said I am still happy with the final product as I believe there are alot of good ideas in there that have come out really well and with a little touch up here and there this would have been exactly as I wanted when I set out to make it in week 6.

Lazer beams could have been in shot longer 

(I couldn't upload any videos to the blog as they all exceed the 100MB limit)

Final Animation Update Part 2

With the animations of the ships finished, I needed to add lights to the scene. This I found hard as there are many selections of lights in maya. The one I found most effective was the point light as it added the effect to the scene as if it was using the default light settings. As this is what I used when creating the scene and it was what i wanted the scene to look like i felt using this lighting technique was the best way forward. However as it is set in space I wanted the lighting to be a shade of yellow to replicate the sun. This ended up meaning the lights were changed to 3, 2, and 1 in the colour column to get a yellowy orange colour on the scene. However this wasn't the same for every scene and I wanted white light in other scenes. Also as I wanted some things to be highlighted in other ways I used directional lights with the spot lights to highlight objects such as the space station. Also as I have included the X-Wing shooting at the intercepter, I wanted the cylinders shooting at them to emit light. To use this technique I used the youtube tutorial on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CijESEporUo to help me with this new technique. Also i have added all the sky domes to my scene.

The picture show the gun on the left getting ready to fire a cylinder which in render time would have a glow to it, it is then fired at the ship in front. It also shows the sky dome surrounding the scene. 

I also tried to add some sound to the animation within maya but it didn't come out as I expected. The sound wasn't very loud and was muffled. I am trying to see if adding sound to the animation after the animation has been rendered would be an easier thing to do.

Final Animation Part 3

Having searched new techniques of how to put sound on the animation, I used this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wF0hz9anQ0 to add sound to the final project. The sounds I added were a take off sound to scene 1, a blast off sound to scene 2, the shooting sound effects to scene 4 and the star wars theme song to scene 6 to end the animation. Now all is left to do is render the animation and test whether the animation I created was the one I expected in the inspector. The sound appears to be working in the inspector when I drag the time line along, so this should be the case in the animation.

Final Animation Update

I have split my final animation into 6 separate scenes as I found that easier to split it onto different sections and work on the different sections with their own movements and camera's. So far i have the bare bones of the animation i want to do as the movements and positions are all in place. The things i have found difficult are animating the asteroids individually to look as if they are moving towards the ship and the ship is dodging them, also I found positioning the camera relative to the action quite hard. In all the scenes I have deleted the sphere that would be the environment as I am working at home and the mac wouldn't allow me to put the texture on the existing sphere and crashed so I have left that to when I am back in the Lab session tuesday. In the scene 1 I have done I have used the motion paths and camera following it. The X-Wing rises from the station and this is the first scene finished. Also I have modelled a space station based on the one in this picture (below) but have left the texturing blank as I needed to concentrate on the animations. This could be textured once all animations are finished if I have enough time.

SpaceStation

This shows the ship rising on space station

The second scene changes camera to an over the shoulder type shot but over the space stations shoulder to see the X-Wing fly off into space at speed, this is the first 5 seconds of the animation complete. I used the motion path again to set the speed and distance that the X-Wing would fly off.

Over the shoulder shot of space station

The third scene shows the X-Wing in space and spotting the tie interceptor in space. The camera then shoots towards the interceptor to emphasis the point that the X-Wing has seen it.

The fourth seen follows and shows the X-Wing pursuing it and ending up at the asteroid field. Again here I used the motion paths that intertwine with each other to give the illusion of a high speed chase and also used the animation of the camera to show the X-Wing spotting the ship.

The fifth scene was the hardest to do as it included the asteroids, I had to use the motion paths again and use them to move around the asteroids and then I had to animate the asteroids to make them come at the X-Wing, to make it look like the asteroid field was moving itself. Again i used the same camera shot as in the 3rd scene as it makes the watcher become immersed in the asteroids as they fly at them but i change camera half way through to give the watcher an idea of where the X-Wing is in relation to the asteroid field.

The sixth and final scene shows the X-Wing come around the moon to show that the Intercepter had retreated to the bigger ship the defender. The ship looks at both of them, R2D2's head swivels to induce panic and then the X-Wing retreats at high speed. I used the normal key animation to get the high speed movement but also used the aim connection on both the other ships to make it look like they are watching the X-Wing leave.

This is the bare bones of my project and it will look a lot better with the environment sphere in place, I am also looking into making the ship be able to shoot and implementing sound into the animation to improve it.

Week 10 Animation progress

The animation I am truing to achieve consists of motion paths and creating key frames so far, the difficulties I am finding is trying to get the Ship to follow the other ship closely behind but never catch up so far into my 30 second animation. I think I will have to use the techniques learnt today to get the ship to follow the other one on a motion path  in order to achieve this, however I am unsure weather this connection can be broken during the animation, I suspect not. I am going to continue with researching any possible solutions to this. However i have made a break through as I have made the camera follow the xwing and pan round in the first 5 seconds of my scene meaning I have completed a part of the final animation.

This is the view of the camera on the XWing after panning around it

Week 9 animation progress

This week I concentrated on the actual animation for my assignment. The first thing I had to do was import the three models into the same area and then make then a child of a curve that surrounded them to make the movement of the model easier the having to select the whole model every time. this had some difficulties as I hadn't deleted the history of the models and this mean that when I tried to move them as a whole object the different components of the ship moved at different speeds and dismantled the ship. This was easily sorted by deleting the history but this then removed some textures, so I had to re texture some parts of the models to make them back into their original form.

Once I had achieved this I could look to make the environment that my animation is taking place . To do this I textured a sphere and reversed the normals to create the illusion that there was unlimited space surrounding my ships. Next I had to add the asteroid field that I had included in my design and duplicate special them to get the variation in them that I wanted. This picture below depicts the environment I have created and the next step is to start the animations now everything is in place.

Picture of the ships and asteroids with space texture

Close up of ship with asteroids