Week 12 Pt.3 - What Would I Do Differently

In this final blog post, I will list a few things that I could have done differently in my animation, ways I could have improved it, and so on.

• The TIE Phantom was made facing the Z-axis, while my other ships were made facing the X-axis; this created a problem when animating in Maya as I had to rotate the Phantom 90 degrees. Next time, I will ensure that all my models are made facing the same way, to make it easier to animate them.
• Even with the rocks, the terrain is noticeably flat and featureless; this could be solved using bump-mapping to create more rugged-looking surface terrain. I also feel that I could have modelled the rocks more realistically, had I had the time.
• I had initially wanted to animate a scene with the TIE Fighters shooting at the Y-Wing, but felt this was too complex and removed it. However, I feel that the animation is too slow-paced, and that the addition of the shooting scene could have increased the amount of action and tension in the scene. I also feel that, given the skills I have learned while creating this animation, I would have been able to incorporate this scene into the animation.
• I never actually got around to adding the motion blend in Scene 3, so the TIE fighters do not bank as they perform their respective U-turns. This, however, makes their movement seem more unnatural, and thus more threatening, so is not entirely a bad omission.

Week 12 Pt.2 - The Final Touches

I will start this post by providing a link to my final storyboard: it can be found here.

With my scenes finished, all that remains is a few finishing touches. First is the explosion effect in Scene 6. Inspired by another classmate's example, and pressed for time, I decided to implement a much simpler explosion effect within Maya itself, using an orange sphere with its "glow" setting set to maximum. By using keyframes I was able to make it appear when the Defender hit the rock face (at which point the Defender would correspondingly disappear), and then slowly expand and fade away. I had to look up how to make an object fade out; it is a simple matter of setting keys on its material's Transparency setting.

Fig.1: A still from a VLC Media Player playback of Scene 6, with the exploding Defender clearly visible.

Looking carefully at Fig.1, one will notice that the nooks around the explosion are still in shadow when the explosion should be casting light upon them. To correct this, I will create a spherical Area Light positioned at the centre of the fireball, and animate it in a similar manner so that the intensity fades over time.

Next, I felt that my existing scenes were too empty and featureless, and needed background scenery. I thus populated Scenes 2, 3, 4 and 7 with small, simple rocks scattered around the area to make the terrain look more realistic. I obtained the textures for the rocks from this website.

Fig.2: Scene 2 as it looks with rocks for added scenery. As another minor change, the skydome material has been changed to a surface shader, making it consistent with the other scenes.

With the updated scenes rendered, I then set about importing them into Windows Movie Maker to create the final movie. The final scene fades into a credits scene that simply reads "Created by Ryan Nurse".

My 30-second animation is now complete, and ready to be handed in.

Week 12 - Into the Final Stretch

It is now time to put the finishing touches on my animation. First, I re-did Scene 4 to take into account the TIE fighters' positions at the end of Scene 3; as the TIE Defender ended up alongside the Y-Wing, I also edited the scene to make the Defender repeatedly swipe sideways at the Y-Wing as though trying to ram it, adding to the drama of the scene. My storyboard was also updated to take the changes to the scene into account.

Fig.1: A still from the updated Scene 4; though it is hard to tell from just a screenshot, the Defender is currently swiping sideways at the Y-Wing.

Next, I will create Scene 6. Like Scene 3, this is a six-second static shot, and one of the most pivotal scenes in the animation. It depicts the Y-Wing approaching the rock formation and swerving to avoid it at the last minute, while the TIE fighters both slam into it. I am unsure of what exactly will happen once they collide with the rock; an explosion effect would be desirable but I am unsure of how to create this within Maya, so it is possible that the ships will merely bounce off.

One problem I found while setting up the scene was that the lighting angle I had used for the rest of the animation caused the rock face to be almost completely in shadow, meaning it would be hard for me - and the audience - to tell where it was. I rotated the angle of the lighting by 60 degrees and the rock face is not properly illuminated; of course, this will require the audience to suspend their disbelief.

Fig,2: A close-up of Scene 6; compare it to stills from Scene 5 and you will see how the rock face is better illuminated.

As with Scene 3, setting up the animation itself is tricky and may require some trial-and-error. I will use a curve to animate the Y-Wing's movement, using the orthographic views to help draw it. I do not want the animation to last for the duration of the scene - once the Y-Wing disappears from view there is no point in animating it any further - but attaching an object to the motion path automatically sets the movement to last for the duration of the scene with no way to change it. To counter this, I temporarily set the scene duration to the number of frames I wanted the animation to last for - in this case, 100 - then changed it back to the actual duration of the scene (180 frames) once the motion path had been created.

Fig.3: The Y-Wing's motion path. One can see that it ends at frame 100. The other ships have not been properly positioned yet.

The other two ships have much simpler movement, and so do not require motion paths. The Defender slams head-on into the rock face, whereas the Phantom turns to try and avoid it but clips an outcrop and spins away. I thought about how to implement an explosion effect when the Defender hits the rock face; it was suggested that I do it in After Effects, so tomorrow I will attempt that during the lab sessions. For now, I will simply animate the ship up until the point where it hits the rock face.

Fig.4: A still from Scene 6: the Phantom (highlighted) has clipped the rock face and is spinning out of shot, while the Defender is tucked into a nook having slammed into the rock

As Scene 6 ended up taking up less time than I originally planned, I have shortened it from 6 seconds down to 4 seconds by cropping out the first 15 and last 45 frames, during which there was no on-screen action. To compensate for this, Scene 7 will crossfade into a credits screen. My storyboard will be edited to take these and other changes into account (the final storyboard will be linked to within my final blog post).

Now I have only Scene 7 left to create. Like the first two scenes, this is a very simple scene that depicts the Y-Wing, having escaped its pursuers, flying off into the distance; this will then crossfade into a credits screen.

Fig.5: A still from Scene 7.

All seven of my scenes have now been finished and rendered. All that remains is to add the finishing touches, then string them together in Windows Movie Maker and publish the finished animation.

Week 11 Pt.2 - Solutions to my Problems

As documented in earlier posts, I suffered from problems with getting the Y-Wing in Scene 3 to bank. While there is a "Bank" setting for motion paths, which causes the object to bank automatically as it travels, this proved to be unsatisfactory and ultimately I resorted to blending instead. The ship's rotation and the rotation of the curve were blended together; this meant I had to set keyframes for the ship's Y-axis rotation at various points of the animation, so that the ship's rotation matched the rotation of the curve and it would turn properly. I then set additional keyframes for the X-axis rotation so that the ship appears to bank while it turns.

Fig.1: The attributes of the rotation blend near the middle of the turn; note that the two Y-axis rotation values are similar but not identical, and that the ship will in fact only bank 18 degrees due to the animation blend.

Fig.2: A shot of a similar frame near the middle of the turn, with the banking clearly visible.

The next step is to animate the TIE fighters so that they follow the Y-Wing. This could be done using constraints, to make them follow the Y-Wing's movement, but I fear that these might not look realistic enough. Instead, I will use the same technique I used for the Y-Wing; have them each follow a motion path, and then blend their rotations so that they bank.

Drawing these motion paths was a tricky business, as not only did the TIE fighters have to realistically react to the Y-Wing's movement, they also had to travel a roughly similar distance to it in order to move at a similar speed; I also had to avoid having the ships collide with each other as they turned. Juggling all of these requirements proved tricky, but eventually I succeeded in drawing the motion paths.

Fig.3: A screenshot taken at a similar point to Fig.2, showing the TIE fighters pursuing the Y-Wing mid-U-turn. Note that I have not applied the banking yet.

After this, I chose to render the five scenes I have now completed, comprising 21 of the 30 seconds of my animation. By rendering them now, it will save me time later than I can use to finish the remaining scenes; it will also let me see how my animation looks so far. The issue with shadows not rendering properly turned out to be my render settings: to get the shadows to appear, I used the Maya Software renderer and turned on Raytracing in the Render Settings.

Rendering these finished scenes allowed me to identify some errors which I was able to correct. For example, in Scene 4 the terrain did not cover the entire scene and so there was a black triangle visible in the top-left corner; the terrain was enlarged to fix this. In Scene 5, the seam of the skydome texture was visible to the left of the screen; the skydome was rotated 20 degrees and the seam was hidden.

I have made a lot of progress this week, but I am by no means done yet, as I still have two more scenes to complete. Scenes 3 and 4 also need editing; Scene 3 to add in the banking of the TIE fighters, and Scene 4 to correct the positions of the TIE fighters to match their positions at the end of Scene 3. These should be simple enough to do, and then it will be a matter of merely importing my rendered scenes into a movie-editing program and stitching them together to create the final animation.

Week 11 - Problems and the Next Scenes

As described in my previous post, I have run into problems regarding the animation in Scene 3; namely, I cannot figure out how to get the ship to execute a banked turn. I have decided to leave Scene 3 for the time being and consult my tutor on how to do the scene during tomorrow's practical.

Furthermore, I then attempted to render Scene 1, partially to try and figure out the ideal rendering settings, partially to get it out of the way so I am not panicking about rendering times towards the end of the project. The scene rendered relatively quickly on my laptop, however the shadows are noticeably poor, even in "Production quality", Maya's highest quality settings (see Fig.1). Again, I will consult my tutor as to why this is the case - perhaps there is a setting I can change to fix the shadows - and if needs be, I will simply render the scenes using the university computers.

Fig.1: A still taken from my computer's rendering of Scene 1, as viewed in Windows Media Player, showing the terrible shadow quality

Due to these difficulties, I have decided to move on for the time being and do the next scenes. Scene 4 is another aerial shot similar to Scene 1, but zoomed out and from a different angle; it is thus much easier to animate. Like Scene 1, the skydome is not visible and is thus not needed.

Fig.2: The first frame of Scene 4, as it looks in Maya

The next scene, Scene 5, is an on-board shot from the Y-Wing as it approaches a large rock formation. To achieve this "on-board" look, I used the Align tool to move the camera so it was in line with the Y-Wing's nose cone, before having to move it forwards so it actually poked out of the front of the ship.

Fig.3: A close-up of Scene 5 after the camera has been aligned with the nose cone...

Fig.4: ...and what the camera initially saw once it had been aligned, until I moved it forwards

Due to the set-up of the scene, the TIE Fighters will not be visible and are thus not needed; however, I will need to model the rock formation itself. Since it will also be visible in Scene 6, it would be better to create it in a separate scene and import it into both. The rock formation will be made simply from a cuboid that I will sub-divide into several sections before manipulating and smoothing its edges and vertices to produce a craggy look.

Fig.5: The giant rock as it looks in its own Maya scene

Fig.6: The scene as it looks with the untextured rock added. Note that its scale may be changed in the final scene.

I used the same texture for the rock as I did for the ground, and the same shader type as well (Lambert), but I used a different material with lower tessellation (as it is much smaller than the ground). As with the TIE Fighters, the lighting angle means that the front of the rock is in shadow, giving it a menacing effect.

Fig.7: A close-up of the rock within the scene, showing the texturing and the shadow on the front face (note its proximity to the edge of the skydome)

With this in place, all that is left to do is to animate the ground and the rock, to make it seem as though the ship is rapidly approaching it. This is easily done, and so will not be documented. Hopefully, i will soon be able to go back and complete Scene 3.

Week 10 - More Complex Animation

This week O have learned a few advanced techniques for animating. These are constraints and Set Driven Keys, both of which allow one object's movement to affect another object in some way (such as causing the other object to follow it, or to rotate as it moves by). These techniques will come in handy for the third scene of my animation.

The third scene is a six-second-long static long shot, showing the Y-Wing performing a sudden U-turn to try and shake off its pursuers only for the TIE fighters to follow it. This will require significantly more advanced techniques than my previous scenes; the most obvious example is that simply moving the terrain beneath the ships will not work this time, so I will have to move the ships themselves. Additionally, while my previous scenes omitted some objects that were not necessary (the first scene had no skydome and the second had no Y-Wing), I will not be able to do this with the third scene.

As with the other scenes, the first step is to set it up. After some investigating, I discovered that the reason the skydome was shadowed was because I had applied a Blinn shader to it instead of a surface shader; for this scene I set the skydome shader to a surface shader and it was now properly illuminated before I even added the light source.

Fig.1: A zoomed-out view of my scene without the light source, showing how the surface shader causes the sky to be illuminated at all times

Fig.2: A slightly zoomed-in view of the completed scene set-up, showing the Y-Wing and TIE fighters in position

The easiest way to animate the Y-Wing's movement will be to create a bezier curve and get it to follow it. This will be easiest to do in the top camera view. Getting the TIE fighters to follow is a little trickier, but I will focus on that later.

Fig.3: The bezier curve that the Y-Wing will follow. Though it cannot be seen here, I have raised the line to be at the same height as the Y-Wing.

By going to Animate - Motion Paths - Attach to Motion Path, the ship now travels along the curve. I want to make it bank inwards as it turns, so the animation looks more natural, but I cannot currently figure out how to do this as keyframes do not appear to be compatible with motion paths. I shall explore this later.

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.