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.

Week 8 - Setting the Scene

For Week 8, I began work on my animation. The first step was importing my three models into Maya and attaching them to handles, allowing me to manipulate them easier. Here I ran into two problems. The first was that the chassis of the TIE Phantom, which I had shaped using the Boolean - Difference tool, would not move in tandem with the rest of the model; to fix this I deleted the history of all objects in the scene, meaning the chassis was now treated as a simple object rather than the product of a Boolean operation. This also reduced the file size of the scene.

The second problem was that the Y-Wing model had been built to a different scale to the TIE fighters and was thus much smaller than it should have been. This was fixed simply by scaling the Y-Wing to double the size.

Next, I created the skydome and the terrain. The skydome has "double-sided" turned off, allowing me to see inside it, and is textured on the interior rather than the exterior; this was accomplished by inverting the normals. The terrain is also textured, and significantly larger than the skydome, allowing me to scroll it to create the illusion of movement. The texture used for the terrain is freely available from www.yoyogames.com; the skydome texture was provided by the university.

Fig.1: The scene as it looks so far.

Presently the skydome is very small, and so the horizon curves very visibly, which will not do at all for long shots. I can not eliminate the curve, as of course the interior of the skydome is circular, but I can minimize it by simply expanding it (and then the terrain to match). When making the actual animation, I will have to be careful to keep the ships near the centre of the skydome, or the join between it and the terrain will become obvious.

Fig.2: The skydome and terrain have been expanded, and the textures scaled to match.

The next step in preparing the scene is to add lighting. This will take the form of a directional light, placed somewhat near the edge of the skydome to simulate an afternoon sun; as can be seen in Fig.4, this creates a stark effect where one half of the ships are strongly lit and the other half are strongly in shadow, adding to the drama of the scene and enhancing the sinister look of the TIE fighters. The skydome will not cast or receive shadows, so I do not need to worry about it interfering with the lighting.

Fig.3: The scene with the added directional light.

The ships do not appear to cast shadows at the moment; this may be because the directional light is too far away. I will investigate this further. For now, however, there is one last thing to do: add the camera. Having done that, the scene is now ready to begin animating.

Fig.4: The camera, shown in green, positioned above the Y-Wing, ready to film the first scene of my animation as described in the storyboard.

Week 7 - Improving My Storyboard

This week I have been taught about the twelve principles of animation, as well as the theory behind camera angles. Using this, I will look at how I could have improved my storyboard.

The fourth part of the storyboard is a 6-second static long shot as the Y-Wing performs a banked U-turn and the TIE fighters follow it. This shot is not very dramatic, and perhaps could be replaced with a closer shot that pans from the Y-Wing completing the manoeuvre to the TIE fighters beginning it.

Week 6 Pt.2 - Storyboard and Moodboard

As the final part of this first assignment, I had to produce a 30-second storyboard for the animation that I will have to produce in my next assignment, as well as a moodboard (essentially, a collage of all my reference images). 

To preserve their size and quality, the moodboard and storyboard have been posted elsewhere and linked to below, rather than being inserted directly into this blog post.

Storyboard: http://i.imgur.com/OJpQVLk.png
Moodboard: http://www.gomoodboard.com/boards/3DnjgWnN/share

Week 6 - Texturing the Models

It is time for the final step: texturing the models. I will start with the TIE Phantom. As seen in Fig.1, I have added several new details to the Phantom, as well as some basic Blinn shaders to set its colour scheme. in some cases (such as the cylinders in the wing mounts) I deleted some unnecessary polygons to save geometry.

Fig.1: The TIE Phantom with additional details and basic shaders

More advanced textures are added by applying individual shaders to each object to which I want to apply a texture. To make sure the texture is mapped properly to the object, I use the UV Texture Editor to edit the object's UVs (the vertices that the texture is wrapped around). Fig.2 shows the UV texture map for the main cockpit body (the front of the cockpit has already been mapped).

Fig.2: The UV texture map for the main cockpit, to which its texture will be applied. Note that only the sides are included in the UV map: the front and back (which are not visible) are not part of the map.

The textures themselves, due to my limited skills in Photoshop, are simply created using PowerPoint, with the reference images as a rough guide. Fig.3 shows the texture for the main cockpit (may be subject to change in the final model).

Fig.3

When I apply this texture to the model, what I get is this:

Fig.4: The model immediately after having the cockpit texture applied.

To fix this, I had to open the place2dTexture panel and manually edit the attributes of the shape until I had the desired appearance (as can be seen in Fig.5). I was also forced to rotate the shape itself to align the cockpit texture properly. I could have used the UV Texture Editor to accomplish this, but in all honesty, I forgot it even existed.

Fig.5: The cockpit once the texture has been repositioned.

The TIE Phantom model is now complete. The next model to be textured is the Y-Wing. This is a slightly more tricky model as there are several complex details that need to be added, but eventually, through use of planar mapping, I managed to get that done as well.

Fig.6: The fully-textured Y-Wing.

The TIE Defender is all that is left. However, this only requires two textures. One is the windscreen, for which I can simply use an altered version of the windscreen texture from the TIE Phantom.

Fig.7: The windscreen of the TIE Defender, an altered form of the TIE Phantom's windscreen.

Fig.8: The TIE Defender with the windscreen textured on

The second texture is applied to the base plate of the wing, to match the wings themselves. This texture was taken from the TIE Defender blueprints that I used as reference images, and can be found here: http://unusualsuspex.deviantart.com/art/TIE-D-Defender-ortho-415211443

Fig.9: The finished TIE Defender with textures added to the base plates

All three models are now more or less finished and textured. The final step will be to prepare my moodboard and storyboard, before making my final submission.

Week 5 Pt.2 - TIE Defender

For my third and final model, I decided to create a TIE Defender. While I have already created a TIE model - the Phantom - the Defender is different enough visually that it is suitable as my third model. It also provides a handy narrative idea for the 30-second animation I must produce later on, as the Y-Wing I finished earlier in the week could be being pursued by the two TIE fighters.

As with the other two models I have made so far, the Defender's basic chassis is fairly easy to model. The cockpit consists of a single sphere, with a large triangular section at the rear to which its three wings are attached.

Fig.1: The basic chassis of the TIE Defender. The sphere is angled at 90 degrees to make texturing the windscreen easier.

On the end of each tip of the triangle is a wing mount. This consists of a cylinder that gets dramatically wider at the end, where it attaches to the wings. To save polygons, this will be made from a single cylinder, divided into two sections.

Fig.2: The chassis with the wing mounts added.

The next step is to assemble the Defender's three wings. These are rather more complex than the Phantom's. The first step is the base plate, which attaches to the wing mounts. On top of this is a small domed structure; this is drawn directly on by making the base plate a live surface.

Fig.3: The base plate with added hatch

As with the TIE Phantom, the main part of the wing can be produced from a single thin cuboid, however unlike the Phantom, each wing has two, attached to either side of the baseplate at an angle. After working out the angle with trigonometry (I won't go into that here), I crafted the wing, added additional details, then duplicated it onto the other side of the base plate.

Fig.4: The completed wing with extra details. You will notice that unlike my other untextured models, here I have textured the wing interior for clarity purposes.

Fig,5: The finished wing assembly, with a wing either side of the wing mount

Having finished the wing, I can now duplicate it and mount it onto each of the wing mounts.

Fig.6: The ship, complete with mounted wings

The ship is not quite finished yet. Attached to the rear is a hollow cylindrical object that houses the engine. This will be constructed from a single pipe object, split vertically into two sections.

Fig.7: The engine element

Fig.8: The ship from the rear, with the engine element added

All three of my ships are now essentially complete. I will spend the last week of the assignment texturing them and adding various miscellaneous details, because storyboarding the 30-second animation that will feature them.