Animating the First Scene

Animation

Maya is one of the fore runners in terms of animation software on the market, this is mainly down to how its animation interface is set up for ease of use.

At the bottom of the screen you can see a time slider, set up in frames per second. Just to the right you can set the time of the end frame, and also you can slide the time slider or expand it to zoom in to fine tune a specific part of the scene.

Time Slider

Within the windows-settings/preferences menu you can change things such as the size of the timeline (I made mine higher so to make it easier to see) and you can change the frame rate of the scene amongst other things

Preferances

Scenes can be created in various ways, but always by adding key frames. To set an original key frame the hot key is to press 's'.

Each model can be selected and given there own key frames. I started off with the x-wing, positioned it at its start point, then hit S to set its original key frame. Notice that a red line will appear on the time slider to represent the key frame. You can then reposition this by holding shift-left click on the red line, and moving it accordingly.

Set Original Keyframe

The first technique to animate the first scene is simply to move the time slider along a set amount of frames, then reposition the model, hit 'S'. Now slide the time slider between the two key frames to see how it looks.

Second keyframe

At this point don't worry about the viewpoints as this will be amended later when adding cameras.

Keep on adding key frames and re positioning the model and hitting S along the time line. A good tip that I found was to make the key frames equally distanced apart so that you can judge the same distance that model should cover between each one.

More Key Frames

I imported four Interceptors in total , as I wanted to have them appear in a normal formation, and then upon spotting the x-wing changing into an attack formation (by using the previous mentioned simple technique).

Normal Formation

Interceptors Rotating

Attack Formation

You notice that I removed (moved out of scene) the hemisphere background so that each individual model could easily be selected and manipulated. Again move the time slider along, then position one by one the models into its new position and hit S to add the key frame.

When you want to add the background again, go to the beginning of the scene, re position the background and add a key frame (S) for the back drop.

If you want to fine tune the movement of the models you can use the Graph editor. Within window - animation editor - graph editor you will find this menu. 

Graph Editor

Whilst in the graph editor, select a model, then hit F. You will see the graph lines appear. These represent the position, scale and rotation of the model. By selecting the black dot at any point and moving it, you can alter its values so that you can achieve a smoother more accurate animation.

Lastly for the first part of the animation I created a long thin tube, added a blinn material and made it bright green to represent a laser shot.  

Slide the time slider to just after the Interceptors finish their formation changes and position the laser just outside of the turret. Hit S whilst the laser object is selected to add a key frame with that laser in position

Use Ctrl D to duplicate the laser multiple times and move them to different turrets. Then again simply slide the time slider along, move the lasers so that they are heading towards the x- wing and keep hitting S. 

Lasers

Attack

I then animated the X-wing to do a corkscrew to avoid the lasers.

Cameras

So now I have ten seconds of animation. Now I will add a camera. Go to menu create-camera-direct camera. Because my environment is so big I scaled up my camera. This does nothing to the cameras view point perspective, it simply makes it easier to see. 

Add Camera

Also rename the camera within the layers menu so that you can select it easier.

Camera layer

So now we have a camera I went back to the start of the frame. I found this to be the best technique, by going to the Panel menu, with the camera selected then hit look through selected objects.

Now that we are looking through the camera we can see exactly what will be recorded for rendering.

Position the camera to a good start point, where we can see the x-wing, and the same as we did with the models, add key frames using S.

Add key frames whilst following the scene along the time line, positioning the camera so to get the best view of the scene at each point.

Experiment with different views and angles. The first attempt is not necessarily the best.

I will move onto more advanced techniques for the next scene, but here are some screenshots of my progress so far.

I started to render the scene, mainly to learn how to but also to put it online. I realised that the lighting was a little off from the position of my three point lighting. As its a space scene I decided to create a sun object that will emit light (that can wait for the next blog).

Whilst rendering I will talk you along some problems that I came across.

First of all, you should analyse the settings to decide, is it a final production or just a test?

The reason I say this is because the render sequence takes a long time, I set my sequence to full settings and rendered the full scene and it took nearly 20 minutes on a quad core processor! For this scene as its only an alpha version I set the lowest settings.

Also make sure that you set the file name and the destination. You should always set the project file within the file menu.

Once that you have rendered your scene, open Adobe After effects and import the first file. This didn't work for a while because Maya renders individual images, not a sequence or video. So make sure that you click the add sequence tick box.

Import Sequence

So with the low quality settings here is the first rendered test scene.

Preparing for Animation

Setting up the Scene

So to start the animation process I first had to create a new project file to be used for the scene. To add a background effect an easy technique to use is to create a hemisphere with a space texture effect, and add the texture to the inside of the half sphere.

Add caption

Again the UV texture editor is handy to properly position and scale the texture.

Then the models need to be imported into the scene (File-Import). Upon importing my X-wing model I encountered an issue when trying to manipulate its angle.

As you can see each part of the ship rotated about there own separate axis, not ideal.

To fix this problem I went into each project file (x-wing, interceptor, millennium falcon) and used the combine tool to make the ships into one object. 

Combine Interceptor

Combine X-wing

Combine Millennium Falcon

I created a sphere and added some saturn style rings just to add some terrain to the space battle.

Planet creation

To easily find my models within such a large work space I created a layer for each and added each individual model to its own space.

Create Layer

Now I have all the elements I need to move to the next stage, setting up the lighting.

Ready for lighting

As previously mentioned a good scene should have appropriate lighting to, I am going to use the 3-pointed lighting effect. Maya makes it easy for you to add many types of cameras. I am going to use 3 'directional' lights.

Add camera

After adding the camera you can select its direction, also you can turn on the shadows effect from the atribute editor.

Lights casting shadows

Make sure that the shadows are turned on within the shading menu.

No shading

With shading

Now the lighting is finished, the next steps will be animating the scene, followed by adding cameras.

Cameras and Lighting

Cameras and Lighting

Before I dive into the animation sequence of my Star Wars production, Ill start by having a look at some professional techniques used to create a good looking animation sequence.

Cameras

Camera movement, frame and angle size play a considerable role in how your scene will be portrayed. Effective use of cameras is a good way to add character and feeling to your final cut. 

Camera techniques vary in aspects of camera movement in space, angle of shot and size of frame. 

The range of camera techniques in terms of movement include: 
- Panning Moving left, right freely
- Tilting Pivoting up and down 
- Dollying Moving of camera towards or from an object (not zooming) 
- Tracking Moving left or right but attached on a specific track 
- Cranning Camera free from the ground; attached to a crane or helicopter. Good shots for beginning and end of film. 

The size of frame (size of shot) influences the meaning which an audience will interpret Depends on the distance the camera from the subject and the focal length of the camera lens. In terms of frame size, basic camera techniques are: 

- Close-up - Medium-shot 
- Long shot 
- Point-of-View shot 

In terms of angles the following camera angles are widely used in cinematography: 
- Bird’s eye angle 
- High angle 
- Eye-level angle
- Low angle Each of the above angles is used to give a different feeling to the viewer depending on the scene and scenario. 

Just to give a little more detail about my storyboard, I intend to start off with a Cranning camera effect viewing the X-wing, dollying the camera back and forth to show off certain details of the ship, Following that I will have an eye level angle from the back showing the ships thrusters in action, revealing multiple Interceptors approaching from the distance, Camera then zooms to a close up shot of the impending danger.

I will experiment with different camera angles, sizes etc. whilst the X-wing dog fights with the Dark Side, and try to get the best look. I will blog that as I do it.

Athough I will make use of some close up shots of the Millenium falcon as it appears to help out the X-wing in the fight.

Lighting

The most common technique in lighting is arguably the 3-Point lighting. It consists of three sources (Points) of light which are referred to as: 

- Key light This light is the primary light source of the scene and is the most influential and strongest in terms of intensity. It is placed 0 o and 50 o to the side of the camera & above the camera. 

- Fill Light This is a secondary key that is placed on the opposite side of the subject from the key light. It opens up the shadows of the key light and provides subtle illumination of the subject. It also acts as the indirect illumination. It is placed between 10 o and 60 o to the side of the camera, and up to 15o above the camera.

- Back Light (or Rim light) This light separates the subject from the edge. It is placed between 50 o and 10 o below the camera. Note: As you may have noticed the positioning of the light sources is relative to the camera. Thus, it is the camera that comes first into the scene and then  the lights.

Key Lighting

I intend to model some planets and a sun, so the fill light will always be directed from that angle. I will use the fill and back lights at different intensities during different scenes, its hard to say right now before I do it but I will be sure to blog it along the way.

UV Mapping - Millenium Falcon

Millennium Falcon Texturing

Original Model

So I start with the model previously created in my blog. I uploaded an image of the ship and wrapped it using the add material function previously noted.

See that I dragged away the glass material for the window so as not to select it by accident, thus keeping the same properties for it. 

Add texture

You can see that Maya didn't fail completely at wrapping the image, although it still was not good enough. The UV mapping editor (within the edit UVs menu) is used to more precisely position your texture by editing the position of each uv point.

Re position UVs

Also select objects and faces to be a different texture and detail the,m accordingly.

Detail

Final Results

Final Results

Final Results