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#68 - Animation - Evaluation

Now that my animation is complete, I will evaluate how I think the overall process went and what the main issues were, as well as how to overcome these and improve my animation skills in the future. A lot of this I might have mentioned already but I would just like to summarise it all together. One of the most important aspects of the animation is the storyboard, which outlined all of the camera angles, timings and positions of the models which I planned to use throughout the animation. I can safely say that my animation followed this storyboard exactly. The camera angles are the same as the images in the storyboard suggest, and the models are in the right place. The action and motion is the same, and it all happens at the right time, lasting exactly thirty seconds. Except for the first couple of scenes, where the camera was taking too long to move into position, I did not have to adjust the timings at all for the rest of the animation. The only models which do not move in time are t
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#67 - Animation - Rendering and Exporting

When the time came to export my animation, I had to render it 150 frames at a time, some with the EMP emitter in and some without, and then upload each file to YouTube. YouTube would compress it into an mp4 format, then I could download it again and import this new, much smaller file into Adobe Premiere Pro, which I used to piece together the final animation. Generally, this went well and did not take too long. I managed to compress and add each of the 900 frames successfully and put them into premiere pro. One frame was doubled up but it only lasts for one thirtieth of a second so it is not a big deal. I did have one quite huge problem when trying to batch render the frames. I had already successfully got the frames with the EMP emitter, then once I had deleted it and tried to batch render the start of the animation, it would just stop at frame 1. I had to move computer and sit and wait for ages before this would work again, wasting about an hour during which I could have added at lea
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#66 - Animation - Music

The only sound I have in my animation is background music, which lasts the full thirty seconds. I do not have any sound effects because I ran out of time, simple as that. I should have been more prepared and paced myself better, then I would have been able to add some great sound effects, but unfortunately it is too late now. The good thing is that the music suits the scene well. It is quite dramatic, dangerous music, which support the narrative by saying in this scene some shady things are happening. I also managed to cut a thirty seconds excerpt out which fits perfectly. It doesn't start on a strange note and it doesn't finish on a strange note. It is in fact the 'Imperial March' from 'Star Wars: A New Hope' taken from YouTube. To include this music I downloaded it and imported it into Adobe Premiere Pro just when I had finished piecing together the animation sequence. I used the razor tool to cut out the thirty seconds I wanted and moved this new excerpt in l
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#65 - Animation - Texturing 3

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I will describe how I textured my Jedi Star Fighter once I had placed it in the scene, at frame 660 (which is why this was done later than the others). But first I will mention that, due to me running out of time and not being able to figure out how to do it, I was unable to make the debris objects fly out of the hangar. This was mainly because I had parented them to the Invisible Hand and could not set individual key frames without breaking this constraint. I basically had a choice of having them in the hangar the whole time or not having them at all. To try and make up for this downfall, I textured the debris objects with a dark grey blinn, so that when they are in the shot they appear to be reflecting light from the sun behind them and shine, but they unfortunately do not move. The EMP blast would have taken the attention away from the objects anyway, and perhaps have made them invisible. Therefore, it is potentially good to have them stay still, but this could be fixed by revising
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#64 - Animation - EMP Blast

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I attempted to create the EMP blast using a new particle effect. I set the emitter type to directional and changed the particle colour to blue, using the cloud setting. I intended to use the set key function to tell the particle emitter when to start and stop, but for some reason Maya was disregarding my key frames and ignoring my changes. I had frame 0 set to 0 particles per second and frame 270 set to 100, and it was building up to 100 with every frame, and would undo my set key to 0 on frame 269. To get around this, I will render the shot with the EMP separately so that it does not matter if the EMP is firing for the whole scene. I will then turn it off for the remaining shots. (I can't get a screenshot of this anymore because the emitter is deleted and the scene doesn't work anymore anyway - just picture a blue streak covering half of the screen). UPDATE: When I came to render the animation, I did in fact render the frames which I wanted the EMP to be present for first,
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#63 - Animation - Rendering Problems

Unfortunately I have had many problems when trying to render my animation, and I will discuss how I overcame them here. I think it is important to understand why certain things in the animation are how they are. Once I had added my glow textures to the engines, I tried to render my 900 frames and the AVI file was too big for Maya to handle, and it would not export the file. I had to split my scene up into 200 frames at a time, just to get an exported file. The first time I tried this, the file was there but it was really laggy and took about 20 seconds to play a 7 second clip. To be able to get a rendered animation I will have to render groups of frames, about 200 at a time, or 100 for the last clip, then edit them back together once they have been compressed into mp4 files. Another large problem I have is that my Jedi Star Fighter model is corrupt at home. I think it works at University, not use why at all, but I will have to wait to add this model in. If it does not work at Univers
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#62 - Animation - Lighting

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Once I had the movement done and I could see all for the individual frames rendered from the animation camera's panel (the one I will be rendering the final animation from), I realised that some parts of the animation were just not bright enough. The first area was the back of the Venator destroyer. You could see the glow of the engines just fine, but the actual model from the top was and underneath was almost invisible. To fix this, I added a directional light behind the Venator, pointing light directly at it, so when the animation renders you can actually see the colour of the ship now. I also added in a point light underneath the Invisible Hand where it is positioned during the Jedi Star Fighter sequence, because originally when it zoomed in on the star fighter you could barely see it. Now, with the point light, it is totally visible, as is the bottom of the Invisible Hand. Finally, I tried to make use of the bright blue sun I have in the distance by slightly changin
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