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.