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.