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.