#55 - Animation - Hangar Shields

To create the hangar shield I added a cube prefab and scaled it to be the size of the hangar space. I then added a new Lambert to it, set the transparency to high, put on a blue tint and increased the glow.


I had the same problem I had with the debris when I tried to constrain the hangar shield objects to the Invisible Hand. Like the debris objects, I have got the shields constrained from frame 195 on wards, and they do not move with the parent model before that. Conveniently, the hangar shields are also not visible until frame 420 as well, so for the purposes of the animation their current movement is fine. I also had a problem where it would move the hangar shields back for some reason and not cover the whole space, but I fixed this by scaling them up, setting a key frame and luckily they still did not poke out the back of the model.


The hangar shields were quite easy to make, and they look very nice when rendered. There may be a need to improve the texture later on, if they don't glow enough for example, but for now they look fine. If I could improve one thing about this whole process it would be by doing one of two things. Either adding the shields and the debris into the model before importing the model so I don't need to use the parent constraint, or restarting the whole thing and getting the parent constraint right from the start, because I think it is something I could have done earlier that broke it. At this stage however, I do not have the time or the urgent need to do either of these things.


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