[Animation Scene] The End Result

Below is the full 30 second video after each scene had been rendered out and stitched together.

This will be my last post on this blog as the assignment is now over. I now feel I have a much better understanding of the concepts and techniques used in 3D modelling and animation. Going forward I plan to continue making some 3D models in my free time as I feel I have genuinely learnt a new skill thanks to this assignment. If I had more time there are some things I would have like to add to the project, such as more detailed texturing on the ships (not just block colouring), better smoke and explosion effects, sound effects and thruster effects for the ships. Overall however, I am happy with how my animation turned out and I look forward to working with the 3D modellers and animators in future group projects.

[Animation Scene] Adding Special Effects - Part 2

With the smoke and explosions in place, the last special effects I needed to add are the laser shots. I looked into a few different methods, one involved using a particle emitter to shoot a stream of particles out that resembled a laser, however I decided to create the lasers as physical objects and animate them manually. To begin, I created a cube object and scaled it to be long and thin. I then applied a lambert texture to it and made it green. I also increased the transparency of the texture to make it look more like a laser. Finally, I aligned this shape to the guns on the ship that is shooting the laser and duplicated it to the other gun on the other side.

Next I animated the lasers by manually moving the position from the front of the guns, to the target over a couple of frames. Once the laser hit the target, I then made the laser shape disappear.

Below is a video showing the laser effect as it hits it's target and then disappears.

With the effect looking how I wanted it to, I then went about adding the laser shots for each of the ships in scene 2, as show in the video below.

Next, I added the laser shots from the Aethersprite in scene 3 as it does the fly-by shot.

Finally I added the laser shots into scene 4, as the Aethersprite takes out a second Tie Interceptor. As a note, I did add the laser shots into the final scene however because of the camera angle you can't actually see them, so I didn't include a clip of that here.

[Animation Scene] Adding Special Effects - Part 1

With all of  the animation keyframes, all that is left for my animation before rendering it out is to do a pass adding special effects. To begin, I started adding smoke and explosion effects to the ships that have been damaged in the scene. Selecting the model I want to add the smoke effect to, I select the "Smoke" effect from the effects menu. In this menu you can set some attributes to change how the smoke appears. I wanted the smoke to be thick, but also I wanted it to kind of puff out of the ships, to show that it is damaged. To achieve this effect I set keyframes for the smoke that limited the max amount of smoke particles (this was set to 5000). This allowed me some control over when I wanted the smoke to stop emitting for when the ship explodes.

Below is a video of the smoke effects added to the ships that are going to be hit by laser shots in the scene. I will be adding the laser shots later on in part 2 of this blog post.

Next I needed to create explosions, starting with the explosion in scene 2. At first I tried a method that used a fluid emitter, however I found that is was extremely taxing on my system and also didn't produce an effect that warranted all of the extra render time. In the end I settled for a much simpler effect by reusing the smoke effect again, but all situated in one spot. I also deleted the gravity and drag elements for this smoke so it stayed suspended in the area I wanted the explosion to happen. Because the Tie Interceptor already had a smoke element attached to it to show damage, I decided to make a cube object that would act as the emitter for this explosion (I later set this to be invisible).

To finish the effect for the explosion, I applied a lambert texture to the smoke particles and made them an orange/red colour to better represent an explosion. Below is a video of the explosion effect in motion.

With the technique for making the smoke effect and explosions, I started to add these effects to the other scenes, starting with scene 4 as shown below.

Next I added the explosion effect to scene 5, where the A-Wing crashes into the large asteroid.

Finally, I added an explosion to scene 6, where the Aethersprite is chasing the Tie Interceptor and flies through the explosion for the finale.

[Animation Scene] Scene 6

While timing out my animation, I realised that the original idea I had for this scene in my storyboard would not be feasible with the amount of time left. As such, I decided to change it to a camera that is fixed to the back of the Aethersprite as it chases down the last Tie Interceptor and concludes the fight by flying through it's explosion. To start, I moved the models into position and then attached the camera to the Aethersprite. I achieved this by creating a constrain on the camera that made it the Aethersprite it's parent object. This locked it into position behind the Aethersprite, as shown below.

Next I had to draw the motion path for the Tie Interceptor. In this scene I wanted the Tie Interceptor pilot to appear more panicked than the Aetherpsrite pilot. To achieve this I made the Tie Interceptors flight more erratic, as shown below.

I also made the motion path for the Tie Interceptor dodge dangerously close to the asteroids as he was trying his hardest to shake him from his tail.

Next I added the Aethersprites motion path. As far as narrative goes, with the help of the navigation droid on the ship the pilot could find a more straightforward path through the asteroids. He was also more calm and collected than the Tie Interceptor pilot, who is currently in a frenzy trying to drop his pursuer. Below is a picture of the 2 flight paths, the Aethersprite path is highlighted in green.

Below is a video showing the final keyframes of animation for this scene.

[Animation Scene] Scene 5

Next is scene 5. In this scene, the camera sweeps from the bottom right to the top left and shows the A-Wing and Aethersprite chasing the last remaining Tie Interceptor, but the A-Wing can't manoeuvre through the asteroids well enough and crashes into a large asteroid. In this scene I needed to create a large asteroid that hasn't been in the scenes up until now. I did this by just duplicating one of my other asteroid shapes and scaling it up much larger. Next I had to draw the motion paths for the ships, starting with the Tie Interceptor.

Next I drew the motion paths for the A-Wing and Aethersprite, including the crash trajectory for the A-Wing. I found it much easier to draw these curves with the Skydome hidden for this scene.

Below is a video showing the camera angle and the movement for all 3 ships.

[Animation Scene] Scene 4

To begin I set up the models and camera for Scene 4. This is the scene where the remaining A-Wing and Aetherprite chase the 2 remaining Tie Interceptors, taking one of them out from behind.

To start, I created curves for the Tie Interceptors motion paths and attached them to them as shown in the screenshot and gif below.

(From now on during these blog posts I will be switching to webm video when I need to show motion as the gifs are too large). Below is a video showing the camera angle that will be used for the scene, following the ships from the front. I tried to create the motion paths so the ships darted in between the asteroids in the scene. The Tie Interceptor that goes off screen will eventually be shot by the Aethersprite when I add the effects later.

Finally, I added the flight paths for the A-wing and Aethersprite that were giving chase to the 2 Tie Interceptors as shown in the video below.

[Animation Scene] Scene 3

The 3rd scene in my animation is when the Aethersprite warps in and destroys the damaged Tie Interceptor as it's flying away from the dog fight in the previous scene. To begin, I drew a new motion curve for the Tie Interceptor and attached it to it using the motion path tool. This took it away from the center of the asteroid field and towards the outskirts. In this scene, because the Tie Interceptor is already in motion, I needed it to move at a constant speed across all of it's keyframes. To achieve this effect, I went into the "Graph Editor". In this editor you can set the curve of motion, which changes how fast it moves at the start, middle and end of it's animation. I changed the motion to a straight line which keeps it's speed constant. I also attached the camera to the same curve as the ship and adjusted the angle using it's "aim" pointed, as shown in the gif below.

Next, I needed to add the Aethersprite model into the scene, ready to warp in and destroy the Tie Interceptor. I wanted the effect to be that the Aethersprite appears out of nowhere and warps in. To achieve this, I placed the model just outside of the skydome model. I also changed the scaling of the model to make it stretched like the warping effect from the first scene.

I wanted to make the Aethersprite move as soon as it warped in, so it was doing a flyby shot at the Tie Interceptor. To achieve this effect I had to actually duplicate the Aethersprite model as you can't attach a model to a motion path that already has it's position keyframed in the scene. I duplicated the Aethersprite model and made it scaled to 0 until the exact frame that I made the other Aethersprite disappear. I then scaled the duplicate aethersprite back to normal so it could move along it's motion path, as show in the gif below.

[Animation Scene] Scene 2 - Part 2

Now that I had developed the technique I would be using to create my ships motion paths, I made new curves for both the 2nd and 3rd Tie Interceptors in exactly the same way, as show below.

 I then repeated the process on the other side, creating the motion path curves for the A-Wings.

While attaching the A-Wings to their motion paths I ran into a problem as they were attaching to the motion paths upside down, something that wasn't happening to the Tie Interceptors.

In the motion path settings there is an option to "Inverse Up", this flipped the model the right way up.

Below is a gif showing the final flight paths of these models. I will be adding in laser shots and other special effects at the end once all of the animation keyframes are in place.

[Animation Scene] Scene 2 - Part 1

Scene 2 of my animation is the dogfight between the Tie Interceptors and the A-Wings. To start, I saved this scene as a new scene based on the first one. This way I kept the same seed for my asteroid field as before and I could separate out the scene using the frame count. I deleted all of the previous frames of animation and began setting the scene up by moving the ships either side of each other and positioning the camera to overlook the action.

To show the ships flying towards each other I drew curves representing the ships flight paths that I could later attach the ships to while animating their movement. Below is the rough curve I drew using the curve pencil tool before I made adjustments to it.

I started adjusting the curve by dragging out the control vertices. I used these vertices to make the ship weave around some of the asteroids in my scene to make it appear more dynamic.

The curve above was good, but very rough which made for jerky animation. To fix this, I used the "Smooth" tool under the curves menu. This tool took the curve that I had made and made it very smooth, almost like it had been draw using the bezier tool. 

 With my curve now set up, I selected both the ship and the curve, and attached it to a motion path, which makes the object follow the curve based on a set of options. In these options I had to change the ships front axis otherwise it attached to the curve backwards. I also set the start and end frames for the movement based on the end frame from the previous scene, and where I wanted the animation to end.

Below is a give showing the attached movement to this curve.

While this is ok, it moved around very jerkily. I decided to make some adjustments to the curve so it wasn't quite as harsh with some of it's rise and fall to make the movement appear more believable, as shown below.

[Animation Scene] Scene 1

With the asteroid field created and my models textured, I started work on the first scene of my animation. In this scene a set of 3 tie interceptors and 3 a-wings both warp in, from opposite sides of the asteroid field. To create the warping effect I stretched the models out before keyframing their movement. Once they reached their destination, I then keyframed their scale back to normal and made them move forward a bit more, to give the effect that they are drifting after the warp. Below is a screenshot showing the scaling and an animated gif showing the finished effect.

Next I repeated this process for the A-wing ships on the other side of the asteroid field. Although the models aren't actually that far away from each other I made them appear to be completely separate from each other by making the camera cut and pan towards the other side of the asteroid field. The ships appear to be at different sides of the area, although in reality the Tie Interceptors are only just off screen when the A-Wings warp in, as shown in the gif below.

Below is a gif showing the camera change between the 2 sets of ships warping in. During these scene (and all future scenes) I have also employed two types of lighting. One is a very dim ambient light, to make sure the scene isn't too dark, and the second is a directional light, used to give the models more depth by using shadows.