Planning and starting the Animation

Planning  and starting the Animation

The way i plan to make my animation is to  create scenes for ach of the different shot, im then going to only render the  frames that the shots out to avi and use window movie maker to pievce them together, this allows for me to be fairly flexible with the animation lengths as i can edit down the final project to thirty seconds later. My animation will though run at 30fps.

Setting up the render settings,and shader

The render setting i use will be unform across the board as i dont want any of the shots to look different, interms of shading. i have decided to use the Maya software shader as this seems to be the only way to get the glow effect i have on the engines of my ships to work. Also within the maya Software shader setting, i was able to switch motion blur on and increase the antialiasing which imporoved the overal quality of my animation greatly. Motion blur really helps to smooth out the movements of the crafts and generally make the animation look more realistic.

Render setting used 

First scene

In  the first scene i wanted to show off the star and the asteroids so i created a camera that pans in from left to right revealing all the asteroids, I Did this using key-frames. All of the asteroids in the for ground are animated using key frames to give the scene a bit more realism.

 I then had the xwing fly in from behind the views perspective suddenly which i think works really well.the Tie fighter follows quickly in behind  xwing and they fly behind an asteroid.Again the use of motion blur really improved the look of this first scene. Both of the ships in this first scene are animated using the keyframe method, I found that using fewr keyframes  created a smoother animation it was just a bit tricky trying to get the ships to follow the path you want in as fewer keyframes as possible but i think this scene looks really good and sets the overall pace for the whole aniomation

Use of motion blur 

I also rendered this scene from a few different angles as I though  I could use the same animation clip from a different angle later on in the animation.