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.

Creating the scene - Asteroids Part 3

Animating

After this I added a turbulence to the particles and increased the attenuation so that the asteroids were moving, I also added a vortex field to give more depth to the movement, I turned the attenuation
up on this so it was more of a subtle effect.

I'm not sure if I like how they look however, if I have time at the end I will most likely change them to be more elongated.
(Update: I ended up changing how they look, you can see this in the final animation).

Creating the Shape - Asteroids part 2

Adding more asteroids

After I had my variation of asteroids I needed to make more, to do this I firstly used the nParticle tool to make a box of particles. I then used Instancer to create asteroids at each particle.

This however only created one type of asteroid which is not what I wanted, to fix this i had to write a creation expression. To do this I had to create a custom index in the particle shape and then make a new expression for the index in the Per Particle (Array). 

What this expression basically does is it randomises from first object in the list (0) to the last (4) and because 4 is the last on the list, for it to have an equal amount of chance to get chosen by the randomiser I had  to change it to 4.99. I then allowed all data types in the instancer and assigned the custom index to the objects index.

I also did a similar thing for scale except made the random x, y and z between 1 and 4 to give more variation between asteroids. When I did this however I found that some objects were too distorted or elongated, to fix this I added a float for uniform scale and assigned this to the vectors. After this I changed the rotation vectors in the same way.

Creating the scene - Skydome/Asteroids

Skydome

The skydome was pretty straight forward, I used a sphere, inverted the texture mesh and applied a space/stars texture to it. One problem i did have however is that the picture quality was decreased in quality due to the size of the skydome, to fix this i tiled the texture using the hypershade window and this increased the quality without looking like a repeating texture.
(INSERT SCREENSHOT HERE)

Asteroids

Modelling

Firstly to get the shape of the asteroid I created 5 cubes and smoothed them. I then used the Sculp geometry tool to mould the cubes and then smoothed them out again to get some warped spheres. 

After this I assigned a soft body to the spheres so that each vertex is attached to a particle and then I could move the particles and it would move the geometry for me (to get a rocky type texture). 

I then added a turbulence field, played the animation to a point where I liked the deformation and then deleted the particles and turbulence so I had a nicer shape. After this I repeated the step again but set the attenuation to 0 so that each object would recieve an equal amount of deformation in all directions. This gave me a very rocky type look to the object which is what I wanted.

Week 10 - Relationship Constraints

This week we looked at object relationships and how they can be used to link objects together.

Point constraints

These are a good way to keep a certain distance between objects or to get one object to follow another without animating both. If an object is constrained to two different objects it will calculate the difference between them (see image).

Aim Constraints

I think these types of constraints are the ones I will be using most in my animation if I decide to use them. These allow and object to track another objects movement and 'look' at that object. I set up a quick system where one sphere is following a motion path and the cylinder is tracking that sphere.

One way I will most likely use this is for camera tracking on moving objects, a couple of my scenes in my animation require the camera to track a ships movement, this is a perfect way to do just that.

Week 9 - Rigging And Skinning

This week we learnt how to rig models with skeletons and manipulate them using joints.

First step was to make the joints of the skeleton and align them with the hand, this is so they can be manipulated and controlled later









After this I used the interactive bind tool to make sure that no volume was extended more than required.



After this all that needed to be done waws to bind the skeleton to the model and then manipulate the joints. The main problem I faced during this was the model losing shape during joint manipulation, i think this was mainly due to me not editing the bind heat maps very well. I may use this technique in my x-wing model for the animation of the wings but we will see when the time comes.

Week 8 - Motion Pathing

Motion pathing is a great way for objects to follow a pr-set path or for use a a make shift camera dolly.

This week we learnt about motion pathing by making our models follow a pre-drawn path. One of the difficulties I found with this tool was that you had to make very smooth lines in order for the movement to look realistic. Also it is hard to change the objects rotation and scale mid way through the path as this stops the animation. I tried adding a keyframe for the U value of the motion path but this didn't seem to change the objects position.

A major problem that I had with motion pathing was that every time I tried to edit the motion path after an object was attacked to it, Maya crashed, it seems like this is a problem with this version of Maya but luckily there was a fix for it by changing the evaluation type to DG from parallel then changing it back when you are done editing the path.

Week 8 - Bouncing ball Animation

This week we learnt about keyframing and animation.

In this practical we were tasked with creating a bouncing ball animation using a schematic as reference. This was easier than I thought it would be and taught me some useful techniques when creating my star wars animation such as key framing and how to use the graph to manipulate certain aspects of the object.

Downfalls/Useful Tools

One of the hard things about this task was keeping the objects shape throughout each frame when I changed the shape in 2 frames after it seemed to change the shape of the first frame too. To fix this I found that the graph editor was very useful, It helps give a smooth animation and helps to visualise what the actual animation is doing.

Week 7 - Skydome

This week we learnt about lighting and camera movements as well as how to add detail lto our scene using skydomes.

Skydome

For this weeks practical we had to create a skydome. This is basically the sky for your scene and is created by adding a texture to a dome.

This is a really useful tool for adding depth to your scene and making it feel more real rather than having no background. I will be using this technique when I come to make my animation and will replaye the clouds with a space texture.


One problem I had when creating this was that when I imported the picture onto the material, it also imported it onto the transparency layer as well as the colour layer. This meant that my dome was transparent. To fix this i had to break the connection between the material and the transparency layer in the hypershade window.

Blog/model Reviews

Blog 1

http://rayhan3dmodellingandanimation.blogspot.co.uk/

One good thing about Rayhans blog is that it is very detailed and clear to understand, new techniques are highlighted in bold like in my blog. The main problem I have found with his blog is that although the sections for the blog are split into each week, there tends to be too much all in one post, it may have been easier and clearer for other people to find what they are looking for if he split it up into separate posts for each section e.g. 1 post for a practical and another for making the model, post a new enrty as you go through each section. Saying this, I like how Rayhan has each of the class practicals shown step by step where as mine just shows the finished product at the end and a breakdown of what I learned, looking back it may have been better to show the process of each practical and reviewing it as I went along.

The models themselves were good detail and fit his schematics well, the only thing I would have said is that it might have been better if he included a picture of the finished model at the end rather than just the modelling process. I like the way he has reviewed his models at the end of the blog in a clear bullet point list, I decided to review my models as I was talking about them but it might have been easier or clearer to discuss them in a list at the end.

Blog 2

http://danieltsang435.blogspot.co.uk/

I like how Daniels posts are split into sections as he was working on each part, this makes it easy to view a specific section using the menu on the side. The models themselves are well detailed however it would have been nicer to see text highlighted bold where new techniques were used. Again, like with Rayhans blog, Daniel included more detail on the class practicals and how he actually made the models for them, this is something I feel I could have done more of in my blog.

Dreadnaught - Modelling Process

I decided to change my model from the phoenix home to the Dreadnaught as there were no schematics that I could find for the phoenix home, the storyboard still remains the same however.

Basic Shape

As with the other models I started with the basic shape, with this model I found it hard to find schematics and had to resize the images to fit and align correctly. I did this with multiple edge loops and extrusions. 

The main problem I had was trying to get the rounded shape for the bottom as I was using a cube to start with, in the end I added more edge loops to create a rounded effect. What I also found hard was trying to figure out the size of the rounded edge from the front schematic as it wasn't a very basic schematic. I tried to find an easier one to work with but this was the best I could find.

Engine

The engine was quite a simple design and was achieved with extrusions with beveled edges. Once one engine was done I just needed to duplicate it and move it to the right place.


I made a mistake on this bit at first and by the time I realised it was too late to undo, in the reference I was working on the engine only had a cover on the top and bottom half where I put a cover all around the engine. To fix this I deleted the side faces and then bridged and filled hole to fill in the gaps, then used the multi-cut tool to create the edges again.

Ship Details

I created the outer braces and windows of the ship based on the schematics with extrusions and bevels again.

Outer Details

After this I created an antenna and some bulbs for the outer decor. For the antenna I created a cylinder base then reduced the subdivision axis to make it more octagonal, i then extruded the centre upwards and moulded the vertex into shape based on the schematic, After this I created the antenna dish by cutting a sphere in half and extruding the faces.

(I'm not a fan of the bulbs on the outside of the ship but that's what it has in the models I've seen)

Overview

Overall I feel like I need to add more detail to this ship but from the references I've seen, most of the other details are added with textures rather than moulded on the ship itself. One thing I would like to improve on is the shape of some of the edges of my ship, parts are a bit jagged and aren't quite smooth, I wanted to use a similar method I used for the X-Wing but because there were a lot of edges and uneven surfaces it was hard to add edge loops and smooth the surface.