Animation Phase

The Animation phase

The following post will be me surmising the animation creation phase of this assignment and then followed up by an evaluation of my techniques used. 

To start with I imported all of the created models that I did for the first part of this assignment, I then arranged them how I had drawn out in the story board and then started to use the Key frame method to animate them.

I did also use the graphing to straighten out parts of the turning and to make it smoother because key framing is not always smooth. This has made the animation a lot better by combining techniques such as the graphing and the key framing I have created a better animation. 

I set the frames to 30 FPS because to make a 30 second animation simple maths would tell me that I need 900 frames.

I followed the storyboard that I created to make the animation quickly and efficiently with enough time to work on getting the animation looking sharp and complete. 

I did have one problem that I was not able to solve and that was when the tie fighter and the star destroyer shoot the red beams were just floating for most of the animation. I was not able to find a fix for this and thus had to leave it in.

To create the textures for the red beams that the ships shoot I used the PhongE texture and made it so that it would glow and be luminescent.

to make the skybox I used a giant sphere that was bigger then the rest of the animation. Once I had done this I revered the normals and applied a texture of space that was above 30000px to stop it from tearing or from looking low res. This created a seamless sky box and it is the thing I like most about the animation that I have created.

I did texture the models but only in lighter colours as I do not think I had the time frame to successfully create a UV map for the 3 models that I was using otherwise I would have created actual textures for the models by using the UV mapper tool and creating the patterns for them in photoshop. This would be the one thing I would do differently if I had to do it again because I find that it would have made it look easier on the eyes and made it look more professional. 

To evaluate I think that I would have made a better animation if I knew how to stop the red parts from just floating for most of the animation and if I worked on camera angles more because I feel that is one major part that lets down my animation is that my camera skills are lacking and I will have to work on them to improve and get them up to a decent standard if I was to pursue animation any further.

Story board / Mood board

The Storyboard

The following is the story board to a very rough standard:

In frame 1 we open to 3 star destroyers and Tie Fighters flying along when as you can see in frame 2 a Y wing flies in-front. One of the Tie Fighters pursues as we can see in frame 3, the Tie Fighter starts shooting at the Y wing. The Tie Fighters shots all miss the target, this moves onto the star destroyer shooting the Y wing out of the sky.

To evaluate I would say that this is a accurate representation of my animation to a rough standard as it did not have much time spent on the actual story board but more of me actually creating the animation and not wanting to create such a highly detailed storyboard.

Star Wars Star Destroyer

Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyer in Maya 2015

Above is the star destroyer that I created in Maya and the following steps will show how i managed to create a low poly star destroyer.

To get the basic shape I created a prism using the prism tool and then used the vertex selection to drag the points out to match the reference image of the star destroyer that I was using.

I then moved onto creating the back of the model by starting on the engines of the ship this was achieved very easily by using sub divisions on the cuboid too land using the vertex selector to drag them to the points that matched up on the blueprint that I was using. After this I created the actual engines to be mounted on the back part of the ship this was achieved using the cylinder tool and just simply dragging them to to correct size.

The hull of the Star destroyer was easy to complete as I just used the cube tool to drag them out to match the blueprint and then used the boolean tool "Union" to merge them all together.

I then started on the body and this was achieved by using the cube tool and using the subdivision to drag out to match the reference image.

Star Wars Y Wing

Star wars Y - Wing in Maya 2015

At first i used the same technique to change the viewpoint so that I could put the image that i was using as a reference on the the area so that it is flat like so:

 This was the image that I used for getting the dimensions correct on the Y-Wing, I did not bother to cut it into pieces so that i could make it a 3-D reference I just kept it 2D.

This is what one of the engines looked like as I was working on it. I was switching between to two views that you can see here and trying to keep it so the proportions were correct. The back part of the engine was achieved by taking a cylinder and using the vertex selection to drag them out to make more of a hollow cone shape. The sphere at the front of the wing was created by making a sphere and then centring it to 0,0,0 and using the mirror cut tool to make sure that it is even.

The image above shows the finished product before texturing it I created the cockpit by using the cuboid tool and then using vertex selection tools to create more of a cockpit kind of shape. I duplicated the first wing i created to make sure that the second one was an exact copy of the first one.

I added two small guns on the front of the Y-Wing using the cube tool and a gun on top of the cockpit by using the cylinder tool.

Star Wars Tie fighter in Maya 2015

In this blog post I will be showing how I created the star wars tie fighter in Maya 2015.

To start with I found a suitable reference image and copied that into Maya using the view image on the top down view port so that the image would be set to the centre of the screen and i can then start to work on it.

This was the reference image that I decided to use in my work for the space ship.

This is the way I had it set-up and as you can see I used the sphere tool for creating the hull of the ship and for the wing I used a cylinder and created it so that it only had 6 subsections. This made it so that it followed the hexagonal shape of the wing.

In this image I have added divisions to the wing to make them more profound and so that I can later texture it so that it looks like the tie fighter from the films.

In this image I have created the tie fighter and merged it together using the boolean tool for unions.
I will now begin to work on the hull.

The hull on the tie fighter was complete, all I used squares and extruded them to make the panes for the hull window, all i need to do now is texture it.

Week 1

MOD002631  Student number: 1313900  3D Modelling and Animation

Week 1

In this weeks lecture we discussed using Maya over 3DS Max because the industry currently prefers Maya due to it having different pros and cons that are more suited to the industry.

During the practical we created a ships wheel in Maya using different techniques that were explained to us, such as starting by creating a cylinder and dividing it into 6 faces to then create more cylinders off the edges of the original cylinder.

After this we created a more complicated but simple house to use in our games or further projects. We used the bevel and extrude function to create the house. We had to select edges and create them into joined areas so that we could extrude them to make the houses areas more defined this entire building started from one block.