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.