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.