Animation - Evaluation

Lighting

One thing I was proud of in this animation was the lighting, I used a directional light for one side of the ship to light it up but turned the intensity down, I then added a volume light for the sun and added an orange tint, these two lights together created a really great looking lighting to the scene. from one direction however the scene was still too dark, to fix this I added a point light with very little intensity, just enough to light up the objects but not enough to make a noticeable difference to the other main lights.

Other things

Overall I think the animation went quite well, some things I found hard were the motion pathing and making the movement of the ships look realistic. Another thing I found hard with the motion pathing was changing the start and end times, I was also unable to rotate the object while it was on the path, I ended up detaching the model from the path in a new frame and rotating it that way. 

I also didn't get many effects that I wanted to get done the main reason for this was due to time constraints and lag on the system/rendering time. A couple of things I wanted to add was particle effects for the engine, more laser beams (I didn't do this because of the render time increase) and explosion effects. I decided to add these during post render but I didn't have time or knowlege in the video editing software to achieve this.

Making the animation! - Part 3

Scene 9

This scene shows a mid range shot of the x-wing and TIE fighter with the sun as a backdrop as they both destroy each other, this was quite a cinematic show and showed the audience that the battle was tight on both sides leaving them to guess, who will win?

I am not too happy with the TIE fighters animation on this scene the way it rolls to face the X-Wing was not very natural but was the best I could do with the time I had, In future I could have used a motion path and attacked it to that for a smoother movement.

Scene 10

This scene was another over the shoulder shot of the TIE fighter watching the fight between in the previous scene, he then retreats to get backup. This builds on the scene a bit more and shows the perspective of the enemy.

Scene 11

This shows a wide shot of the TIE fighter getting away and the x-wing following, this creates a sense of distance and reinforces that the TIE fighter is escaping.

Scene 12

In this scene the camera follows the x-wing as it chases the TIE fighter through asteroids. This puts the audience right in the action and creates more suspense and tension.

To track the camera to the ship I used the aim constraint, I then attached the x-wing and TIE fighter to two duplicate motion paths at slightly offset times.

Scene 13

This a a slow motion close up of the X-Wing shooting the TIE fighter, this adds some suspense before the shot hits in the next scene (spoiler).

More transformations and keyframing were used here.

Scene 14

This scene shows the TIE fighter being destroyed and the X-Wing flying off, the camera is focused on the TIE fighter during this shot and zooms in on its destroyed boy as it floats into space. The scene then ends. This shot gives a sense of sadness, who is really the bad guy, there is destruction on both sides.

Making the animation! - Part 2

Scene 5

This scene shows a closer shot of the TIE fighters regrouping and then flying in for an attack, one of the difficulties I had was animating the movement of the TIE fighters so that it was smooth when they turned around, it was hard to get a realistic turning animation, in the end the graph editor helped me a lot with this task.

Another technique I used in this scene was using the camera tools to change the yaw of the camera, I ended up using these tools a lot during the process as they are a great way to manipulate the camera to get a certain shot you want.

 

Scene 6

This scene showed a wide shot of the TIE fighters and x-wing, the camera slowley zooms in to just one x-wing and TIE fighter drawing the focus to these ships as the other two fly off, this sets up the shot for the next scene.

A new technique I used in this scene was creating lasers shooting from the TIE fighter. this was done by hiding the lasers until one scene, creating a keyframe, moving the frame ahead by one, un-hiding the lasers and then transforming their position to make them fire. I added a glow effect by changing the texture of the laser object in the hypershade window. I also made the TIE fighter 'aim' at the x-wing by adding an aim constraint so that it was always facing it as it moved, this created a good effect and saved me time tracking the movement manually.

Scene 7

This shot showed an over the shoulder look from the x-wings perspective as it is destroyed and the camera swerves out of the way slightly when the TIE fighter moves past it. This makes the audience feel like it is in the action and it feels like it is more intense.

One technique I tried to use here was the fluid dynamics to create an explosion, this however caused too much pressure on my PC and kept crashing Maya, it also added to the render time too much so i instead decided i would add an explosion effect post render.

Scene 8

In this scene I used a mid-range shot to show more detail but also keep the audiences focus on the ships, the camera also follows the x-wing as it destroys a TIE fighter using the aim constraint. This keeps the focus on the ships and action/pace of the story.

Making the animation! - Part 1

Now that all of the set up is complete (the scene, textures etc.), it was time to finally start making the animation. I based my animation off of my storyboard, changing only the model for the phoenix home to the dreadnaught.

Scene 1

This scene was an establishing shot, it showed a wide shot of the ship with x-wings flying around it to emphasise the emptiness of space and build a little tension (whats going to happen, why is the ship there, it seems quiet, too quiet maybe?).

Some of the techniques used in this shot were simple keyframe editing for the transformation of the big ship and motion pathing for the X-Wings following the dreadnaught. One difficulty I had with this was drawing motion paths outside of the starting grid, in the end I decided to create the path, move it to the ship and edit the vertex when it was near the ship to create a smoothe line, I also found that the tangent spline was a good way to smooth out movement.

Scene 2

This next shot was a mid range shot showing the ship, x-wings and at the end an emerging TIE fighter from behind an asteroid. This generates tension and shows the audience more detail on the scene, what will happen next?

This scene used more motion pathing and transformation keyframing.

Scene 3

This next shot is an over the shoulder shot of the TIE fighter spying on the alliance ships, this shows the audience the perspective from the TIE fighter and builds up more tension in the scene.

This scene used the same techniques as above.

Scene 4

The next scene shows a wide shot of the TIE fighter rejoining his friends with the camera following its movement. This adds more to the story of the scene and lets the user imagine whats going to happen next.

More of the same techniques were used.

Texturing - X-Wing/Dreadnaught

To texture these i just selected faces and added materials to each face, I used the reference images from the moveboards mentioned earlier in the blog.

Creating the Scene - Sun

Texturing

I started by creating a sphere and adding a lambert texture to it, I then changed the colour to black and added a fractal to the incandescent and gave it an orange tint.

Animating

I then decided to add some movement/animation to the sun to give it a bit more of a realistic feel. To do this I added a new expression to the time value to add movement to the texture over time and then added a randomise expression to the threshold value to change the colour and brightness of the sun over time. The expression I used smoothly randomises the range of the value between 0 and 1. I randomised the value around 0.25 as that is what my threshold value was by default then divided it by 10 since 0.1 is 1/10 you can divide the whole expression by 10 to make it randomise between 0 and 0.1.

Partical effects

I tried to add particles to the sun to make solar flares coming out of it but this was very heavily intensive on the render time and framerate of the scene so i decided not to do this in the end.

Texturing - TIE Fighter

I decided to start with the wings, originally I was going to have the wings all black but when I tried this it didn't look very detailed so I instead decided to use a texture and UV map it onto my wing. Firstly I had to cut out the parts of the texture I didn't need for the wing so I used photoshop to cut out the parts of the wing I needed.









I then applied a new material to the inner faces of the wing and imported the texture. After this I used planar mapping to apply the texture to the faces and used the UV editor to manipulate the texture to a way that looked good.

After this I just did another UV mapping in a similar way with the wing middle detail and then applied a standard material to the rest of the model apart from the glass which I added an anisotropic texture and UV mapped a material to make it look a bit dirty.

For the rest of the model i just selected different faces and applied materials to them. I also applied a bump map to the texture to make it look a bit more 3D and less 2D.


I think the main challenge for me with this was the UV Mapping, It was had to texture a certain face as it selected the entire object along with it, To get around this in the end I had to select the faces then choose the UV map I wanted (Planar) and then go into the UV editor.