Final piece

My final animation is complete. I am happy with it and enjoyed creating it I feel that I should have created models with more detail and skinning or creating my own skin but due to time constraints these things I will have to do another time. I enjoyed creating the planet that blows up as though it was a little in-depth  the results show I am also very happy with how my laser looks, my Jedi starfighter even if it was meant to be a Xwing I think the basic shape of the ship although not spot on is very close.

When creating this I had hoped to have an idea where I get a chance to use bones in a model this would have been great to show technique of character modelling I am also let down by that in my final piece the shock wave ring that is meant to come out as the planet explodes for what ever reason did not render out. I am also 2 seconds down from the asked animation time. In my scene where the deathstar fires at the planet I would have liked the deathstar to look more like it was in the background but it look like it is hovering lower that I intended it to look.

Overall I am very happy with how my animation turned out having not done any 3D or any animating before having learnt lots of techniques for 3D modelling and although it is not one long animation in 3DSMax rather a selection of smaller scenes I think it still works.    

Rough cut videos

Here are all the videos I have of my animation currently.

These are all uncut unedited versions I will put them into premier pro, clean them up and mesh them together.


I found there wasn't enough footage and I felt something was lacking from the deathstar scene so I added a camera pan just to give it some depth. This both makes the scene nicer and shows I am able to use camera panning technique.

Once again felt the pacing was off so I redid the scene once again this time I feel its just right.

Creating deathstar laser shot updated

I feel that a basic cylinder for the laser my deathstar will fire is far too basic and have looked on the web for a few guides to help me clean it up and give it the effect I want I came across this tutorial on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwrAIqwTCNY&feature=fvwrel
And will be attempting to create the laser as shown.

After creating my cylinder I set the defuse colour to white and the self-Illumination to 100 after setting the material ID channel to 1 meaning that it will only affect things that have the channel ID of 1. Go to Rendering > Effects > then add Lens Effect.






After adding the Lens Effects add a glow then go into option > and in image sources check both Object ID and Material ID your effect will not update if these boxes are not checked and on the same channel as your laser.





Then change the Radial Colour you want your laser to be I went for green as a traditional laser colour. Now change the Size in Lens Effects Globals I went for a low size 13.0 this means the glow will be closer to my cylinder go back to Glow Element and adjust your laser accordingly.

Use Update Scene and Update Effect buttons at the top to see what your laser looks like.

This is the final effect of the laser I have created.

SkyDome

For a scene I am creating I need to make a skydome I do this as shown before I then had the problem of attaching a skin after finding a sky and applying it to my dome I then converted it to an editable poly to make this easier and in the polygon edit, then in the edit polygon just hitting flip put the skin on the inside of the dome.

I added lighting to my skydome so it was visible from the inside I used a photometric light as after trial and error I found it to give me the best lighting for the dome. And placed it at the top just offset from the centre of my dome.

Starting the animation.

I added a skin to my Jedi starfighter and also a R2 unit unfortunately the R2 unit is yet to be skinned.

This is a few seconds of my first scene although it seems it has not fully rendered. 

I will finish up the animation make the ship more viable and move some of the rocks

I have made another version of this scene it now has          a background and feels more fluid.

This is the final scene I will use in my animation 

To start the animation I used auto keyframes as it is the fastest way to animate.

After adding a free camera into the scene I then made sure any action taking place was in front of it. I used a free camera as it is easier to work with than a target camera for a non moving shot. 

After I added the camera and got the animation to my liking I added a star background to make it look more like space. To do this I went to Rendering > Environment and in Environment Map added a bitmap of stars I have.

When rending out the animation go to render > render setup and in the range area I set the range 0 To 250 as my animation did not go over that many frames and it saves me having to render out unused frames. I set the output size to HDTV (video) for the best quality and set the rendered file as an AVI. 

Making space rocks!

So looking over the work I have currently done I feel it will not be long enough so I am going to fill it out with some scenes of a ship flying through and astroid belt. I went about this by creating a sphere with many segments then going into the modifier list and adding noise to the sphere this gives it a rocky looking surface.




These are the parameters I used but I will make a selection of rocks with different parameters

This is what the final rock looks like.

ClassWork

In this post I will be going through all the work I forgot to document from the classes.

Skinning:

I found a skin on the internet for the deathstar from http://www.scifi3d.com/download.asp?intGenreID=10&intCatID=41&filekey=248&key=148

 I then pressed M to access the material editor from here I can apply changes to the objects I create.


 After selecting a swatch go down to the diffuse box and select the box next to it.

 Select Bitmap from the drop down menu that appears.





After selecting the image you want as your texture it will appear here.

Apply it to your model.

Unrenderd.

At this point I got concerned that it hadn't effected the model but the solution was that the model had not been rendered. 

Rendered

Creating a sky dome:

First make a plain area and put a GeoSphere on it making sure not to cover the whole plain.

After checking the Hemisphere box it will look like the picture above. 

After the skydome is ready making it look more realistic by making it flatter on the Z axis.