#64 - Animation - EMP Blast

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, then I deleted the emitter and rendered the remaining frames, then pieced them all together using Premiere Pro. This is why the emitter is not present in the submitted Maya scene.

The EMP blast itself turned out alright, if you ignore the fact that it's firing for way too long. The actual particles look exactly how I wanted them to; a blue electrical laser firing across the hull of the Invisible Hand. The positioning of each particle is a bit dodgy, and it is clearly noticeable when the emitter was deleted in the animation because the particles suddenly disappear, but as far as the viewer is concerned the energy just fizzled out. The EMP is seen to hit the right spot on the Invisible Hand at the right time, with the hangar shields dropping moments afterwards.


The EMP does not hit the Invisible Hand perfectly as such, and in the third shot when you see it coming out of the Venator it firstly misses then hits the front of the ship all the way along, but the camera angles make up for this by zooming in on the hangar doors. This was note exactly what I intended but it was the best I could do with the emitter not working how I was telling it to, and in the final animation it looks fine. In future, I will spend more time working with emitters and trying to figure out how to control them properly, as clearly for this project I struggled with them greatly.


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