#47 - Animation - Scene Set up

To set up the scene ready for my animation I first changed the settings to suit my purposes. I accessed the settings/preferences window and changed the time to NTSC 30fps. I then adjusted the time slider settings so that the start frame was 0 and the end frame was 900, which is exactly 30 seconds. I set the playback speed to real time so that I can actually see what my animation will look like when I play it in the editor.



Next, I created a 'space dome' inside which the entire animation will take place. I added a sphere primitive and scaled it to be 512 units wide on each axis, then reversed the faces and added it to a template layer. I also smoothed it three times, as this will improve the quality of the texture when it is added without putting too much strain on the render time. This left me with a large open space for my models to move around in, surrounded by a space texture.


Finally, I created the sun which will be the main source of light in the scene. The light I currently have is not likely to be the final version, but it is good for now as I create the general motions of the ships. Reference: I used a YouTube video published by MrToshihir0 titled 'How to create a Sun in Maya' to achieve the following.

I began by creating a small sphere and adding a Lambert texture to it. I set the colour to black, and then clicked on the incandescence attribute and added a fractal effect to it. I then set the colour to be a pale blue, and added an expression to the time and threshold attributes to allow Maya to automatically animate the fractal texture throughout the animation's duration.


Finally, I positioned the sun high above the ships I had already in the scene and placed a directional light in the centre, pointing in the ship's direction. Currently, the ships do illuminate, but the sun does not. When I come to focus on special effects I will attempt to make the sun appear much brighter.


I think setting up the scene was quite successful, given that I had never created an object using expressions to animate their textures. This is a very useful tool because it will make the sun appear quite aggressive without me having to make any more changes, and light will shine around the whole scene (once I fix the directional light properly). One small problem I had was getting the sun to appear brighter on its own, but that will be sorted out at a later date. I think perhaps I could make the texture animation more detailed using the different attributes, but realistically it won't make a noticeable difference to the viewer.

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