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.