Week 9 - Beginning the Animation

It is time to start my animation. To make it easier to animate, each shot will be a different scene; the rendered scenes will then be stitched together using Windows Movie Maker or a similar program to produce my finished 30-second animation. Because of this approach, the skydome is in fact unnecessary for my first scene: since it is a continuous aerial shot, the skydome will not be visible.

This first shot focuses on the Y-Wing at first, before panning left to show the TIE fighters pursuing it. To make this easier to animate, I will use a clever trick: instead of moving the ships forwards and having the camera track them, I will simply move the floor beneath them, creating the illusion of movement. This also allows me to shrink down the terrain a bit. To make the scene a bit more exciting, the ships will move about slightly, simulating air resistance buffeting them about.

Fig.1: My edited scene, with the redundant skydome removed and the terrain narrowed. It now resembles a runway.

First, I select the floor and create a keyframe on the first frame using the S key. I then go to the last frame, move the floor, and create a second keyframe. Maya automatically creates a "tween" connecting the two frames, so that the floor will move continuously on a frame-by-frame basis.

The problem with this automatic tween is that it is smoothed - the floor starts out moving slowly, then gradually accelerates until the halfway point of the tween, at which point it starts to slow down and then stops. Fig.2, taken from Maya's Graph Editor, clearly shows this gradual acceleration and deceleration.

Fig.2: The movement of the terrain as it looks in Maya's graph editor. 

I want the movement of the terrain to be linear, so this will not do. Fortunately, the Graph Editor, as the name implies, allows me to edit the animation graphs in real-time and thus fine-tune my animations. To change the animation tween from smoothed to linear, I simply highlight the line and click the "Linear tangents" button.

Fig.3: The animation graph after setting the tangents to linear.

I can also manipulate individual keyframes, allowing me to (for example) increase the distance that the terrain moves for the five-second duration of the animation, thus increasing the speed. The faster it moves, the faster it will look like the ships are moving, raising the tension of the scene.

The remainder of the scene is very easy: simply animate the camera to whip back and focus on the TIE fighters, then animate the three ships to move about slightly throughout the scene, thus making it look like they are being buffeted by drag and such, thus adding to the realism of the scene. This first, 5-second segment of my animation is now complete, with very little effort involved.

The next scene is a four-second shot from the rear of the Y-Wing, looking back at the pursuing TIE fighters. Again, this is simple to do, and can be achieved by keeping the models static and simply scrolling the terrain; however, this time a skydome is necessary as the horizon will be visible. While creating the skydome, I ran into a problem where the sky was not properly illuminated by my light source and appeared dark. I could not change the light source as I needed to keep the lighting consistent across each scene, so instead I changed the ambient color of the skydome texture from black to white, thus illuminating it.

Fig.4: The second scene with the un-illuminated skydome. Note that the aspect ratio of the scene will be 4:3 in the final animation, not 16:9 as shown here.

Fig.5: The scene with the skydome now illuminated. Note also how the lighting angle causes the TIE fighters (especially the Phantom) to be partly in shadow, enhancing their menacing appearance.

Animating this scene is, like the first scene, quite easy. The terrain simply scrolls beneath the ships, which wobble about a bit to simulate air turbulence, and also gradually creep forward to make it seem as though they are gaining on the Y-Wing. The next scene, however, will not be as easy to animate.