Camera, texturing and Final Thoughts

After struggling to create an animation with only one Tie Fighter and one Imperial Shuttle, I had decided to leave the other two fighters out of it and focus on the camera, I really struggled with the camera, at some points. I thought it'd just be like a focal point from the tip of the camera but I had problems with that allot later.

The first problem was that the camera seemed to not be the render point, fortunately this was a simple setting by switching from main_point to Camera 1 in the render settings. I had to render my video several times to make sure that it did render from Camera 1 as both the play blast and play through Maya both played the animation from the point that I was at in the scene.

Another problem I had was that the camera seemed too zoomed in, this was a problem that I was unable to correct and would like to investigate this further over Christmas as it could help with future animations.

I also tried to texture my Imperial Shuttle but because of the complexity and a few problems I had with my model, I was utterly confused by what was what on the layout diagram, even after moving things around I was still confused and decided to leave the texturing as the Imperial ships are all very grey colours with hints of black. The only model I do regret not texturing was the Star Destroyer as it looks too smooth and more like a foam cut out.

Again, I want to go over texturing again over my Christmas break as it is something I would like to improve on.

I tried to compress my animation using the various compression techniques that are available within Maya using the render settings and here are my results;

Tried compressing using Microsoft Video 1 @ compression rate 30 - Took it down to 5mb but was unable to play

Tried compressing using Microsoft Video 1 @ compression rate 15 - Took it down to 6mb but was unable to play

Tried compressing using Intel YUV - Took it down to 682MB - Very low detail and Vertical lines through all models

Tried compressing using Microsoft RLE  @ compression rate 15 - Took it down to 0kb with 0 seconds

No Compression = 1.8GB

I had to leave my file size at 1.6GB but would love to see what else I could do to lower the file size and make the while project fit onto a CD and not a DVD.

My final thoughts are that my animation looks rushed due to the struggle that I had with the entire unit due it being more art related but I still have room for improvement, if I put more time into the modelling, texturing and animation of the project, it could have looked better but it would have taken me allot longer to add these details due to work getting harder with another unit.

Starting The Main Scene

For the animation I had decided to have it so that three Tie Fighters would escort an Imperial Shuttle towards a Star Destroyer with the Star Destroyer stating stationary or moving slowly throughout the scene.

I started by importing the Star Destroyer and enlarging it, this created a problem as it started to enlarge each of the different shapes on the Star Destroyer, resulting with the engine s being larger than the ship itself. This was corrected by going back to the model and combining the whole model into one shape.

Once my Star Destroyer was created, I placed it far in the back as it was going to be the far, menacing, focal point of my animation.

The next thing was to create the flight path of a ship, because I would only have a single Imperial Shuttle that would be more suited to creating the first flight path.

Before creating any Key Frames I worked out how many frames it would take to cover 30 seconds on animation and I worked out 900 frames would be required for the specified task so I had set the maximum frames to 900 for the animation on the bar at the bottom.

I found that there was a feature that set trails to the models as it progressed through the keyframes and frames in general, it would give a point to where the model would be on each keyframe so I could keep a very similar distance to give a sense of constant speed. Using this feature really helped but I still had problems with the placement of some things due to camera angles making things look like they were in different places.

After a while getting used to the multiple crashes and keyframe placements, I started to realize that the trails wouldn't always update and there would be a gap in the trail placement.

This was easily fixed by pressing the button again, it occassionaly did crash so I learnt to start saving every 30 frames or so to protect me from crashes, it didn't always help but there was some times where it did crash as I loaded the program. I felt that the whole thing would become a constant battle because of the crashing.

Starting to Animate

So with the modelling out of the way it's time for the animation.

I did struggle with the modelling due to not being artistic in any sense but I am going to fully attempt this.

I have been looking into tutorials on basic animation via Maya and most things seem to focus on the use of keyframes. After a little trial and error I had found that 30 frames = 1 second on remdered playback using the default settings and it would always shoot from the position I was at on Maya.

As a trial run I decided to make a Tie Fighter run in a straight line across roughly 150 frames (5 seconds) and realized that the Tie Fighter would follow a path smoothly to the positioning in each key frame. This massively helped me understand that the animation of the flight paths was easier than I had expected it to be.

As a side thing I decided to test the differences between Nurbs and Primatives by trying to create basic meteor shapes.

The Nurbs shapes were easier to manipulate in this sense because they had points that could be pulled in a circular pattern, this was better for pulling out when multiple points were selected causing a meteor like shape.

The Final Model - Imperial Shuttle

My final model was easier than the others as it was made of several shapes that I could pull apart from each other, I did the main body first which consisted of a cube that was stretched, cut and extruded in several places with cylinders that were clipping through the body slightly to create a curved plane effect. These were grouped together and connected and moved to the back. I had found that moving items that I am not using to the back of the grid was a great use of space as I could focus on creating other parts.

Next I created the head out of another cube, cutting one face and moving the vertices of said face to create a droop look on the cockpit as the ship has. I cut out the window and applied a black colour to it and extruded inwards some small detail just below the window. Once this was finished I moved it onto the body and connected them together.

The engines were created from a sphere that was cut in half, extruded two layers of the circle and stuck to the back of the cylinders on the body, an orange paint was applied to give the effect of the engine working.

The wings were the most difficult part as they had allot of cuts and extrusions on them, some cuts messed up the shape entirely and I had to be careful on where my cuts went, I think the problem with the shape messing up was with deleting some edges so that I could extrude an entire face and create a nice effect on the wings. The top wing was mirrored and attached to the ship while the bottom two wings were created, mirrored, placed at an angle and duplicated as they had different detail to them.

I had 6 small struts (3 on each wing) hold the wings to the body at an angle.

Lastly the cannons were made of two cylinders, and cut and extruded to the shape I wanted before plastering them onto the ship.

This last model was the easiest and most fun to make just because I had more control over what I could do in the terms of detail as none of it was extremely close together like the Star Destroyer.

The F16 - Using Overlays

In lecture we were shown another method of copying schematics which may or may not help us with our Star Wars models as most if not all ships have readily available schematics online for free.

I struggled to align the schematics of the plane and with a few attempts I managed to get them into position so that the object was visible in each of the frames.

I didn't like this method at all as it focused on the use of four different views, top, bottom, side and free mode. Because I was used to the free mode alone I struggled to realize that I couldn't use the tumble feature of the camera on the top, side and bottom views and found myself always trying when I wanted to get a different view of the model.

Because I struggled to focus on a single aspect of the ship at one time the model came out looking like a long grey blob, resembling a cloud more than an F16 jet.

I can see how this may be of help to some people but I struggled more with this method and would revert back to using the singular view for my final model.

The Second Ship - Star Destroyer

The Star Destroyer was fairly easy to create with the main body being made of a single cube just being constantly stretched, cut, and extruded in places so that it looked somewhat like a Star Destroyer. I found it easier to fence off a part of the ship with the Multi-Cut tool to create what I wanted to extrude or manipulate and then delete the cuts I had made around the manipulated part of the ship, this helped keep the ship tidy.

I did have a problem late on when trying to move verticies to get the shape how I wanted to but this was solved by moving them step by step, a little slow I must admit but this could have been sorted by moving the verticies into place before starting on any detail of the ship.

I found that if you hold control with the Multi-Cut tool you can cut entirely around an object, this worked well when creating the engines as after finding this out, my engines looked allot better than the one on my Tie Fighter. The smaller engines are just smaller versions of the larger engines and the cooling fins on the back were made with several cuts. Another thing I found while trying to create the cooling fins was that the precision divisions using the Multi-Cut tool would get smaller and smaller due to that edge getting smaller and smaller, the divisions tool didn't work linearly like I would have liked to so I had to use the Multi-Cut tool in a non precise manner, to which I didn't like.

I made a mistake with an extrusion that I didn't notice til much later and couldn't undo it because I had already gone too far ahead with the model, for this I decided to delete the face and use the fill hole tool, this didn't work but a friend recommended that I try and use the bridge tool with 0 divisions as this was the same thing, this worked as I wanted it to and filled the hole without any problems.

When having to make more precise cuts (ones down to 5% divisions) I used the sniper mode on my mouse which immensely lowered the DPI on it so that I could move what I wanted allot more precisely, this was a massive help and I think it would have taken me allot longer to do these bits without this feature.

When moving onto the final part, the spheres at the top of the ship, I used the combine feature to combine the body and engines together so that they would stay in the exact position on the ship when the ship was moved.

The extrusion shortcut Control+E helped speed up the creation of this model as I wasn't having to look for the correct menu each time.

The First Model - Tie Fighter

I had decided that my three models for my modules work would be a Tie Fighter, Imperial Shuttle and a Star Destroyer. This all fit with my animation idea that there would be three Tie Fighters escorting an Imperial Shuttle towards the Star Destroyer before breaking formation when it got close.

I thought the Tie Fighter would be an easy model to create because it was very basic shaped but each time I tried to start either Windows or Maya would crash, this was easily fixed by opening Maya and then leaving it for a couple of minutes as it seems it was caused by Maya loading still.

The first problem I had with the Tie Fighter was that I didn't exactly know how to turn a cube into a irregular hexagon so I had decided to start on the main body and cockpit instead but again I didn't know how to manipulate a sphere in the same way as a cube. This was solved by looking at YouTube tutorials on the different tools within Maya and this helped me understand it is very similar to the cube if I rotated the shape first so that the origin points were on the front and back instead of top and bottom. This new view allowed me to extrude the outer window of the ship and I destroyed the center of the extrusion and created a hole. I found a fill hole tool that filled the hole in with a near perfect circle which was better as I could use another tool that I had learned about to cut the circle to how I wanted, creating extrusions and pulling out the window frame shape on the front of the ship.

Multi-Cut became my most used tool for this model as the divisions tool wasn't doing exactly what I wanted it to do as sometimes it either wouldn't let me use the linear function of the Divisions tool or it wouldn't let me use the tool whatsoever for some unknown reason.

Once the body was basically done I started on the creation of the wings. This became very easy to create with the Multi-Cut tool as I could cut anywhere on the shape to how I wanted it, I also learned by accident that I could control the precision points of the start and end cuts by holding control, this allowed me to place the points within 10% steps on an existing edge, making it a ton easier to make even shapes and cut outs. Using the extrusion tool to push in the inner wind parts I finished the wing and applied a black texture to the inner wing so that I could recognize the object better. Because the object was only extruded to how I liked on one side, I used the mirror tool to speed up the process of replicating the design on the other side and used the duplicate tool to create a second wing.

The struts were annoying to create as for some reason neither my Multi-Cut tool or the divisions tool would work how I wanted it to on the cylinder shape. I did have a happy accident with this though as it added extra accidental detail to the outer part of the strut to make it look like it had ridges on a bit that was extruded inwards.

The engine of the ship was made of a cylinder and I used the Multi-Cut tool to create a smaller cylinder on the end of the cylinder to at 50% divisions on each of the end of the cylinder, extruding it inwards and creating another circle to extrude outwards and adding a blue colour to produce a cheap effect of the engine running.

The two cannons are made of Cylinders and a Cube that have just been stretched and cut then scaled down to the size of my ship. I created this in large because I wanted to get a finer precision on the cannons placement on the stretched cube. Maya allowed me to shrink them all together and move them onto the ship with no problem.