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.