[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.