Adding Background detail & Rendering

In the background of my animation is a small asteroid belt, a few of the ships crash into the asteroid after being shot early on in the animation. The asteroids were all of the same shape, copied and pasted multiple times over each other to add the belt style to it, each asteroid is the exact same NURB sphere that has a few of the points on it pulled out and stretched.

I placed the asteroids around the last half of the animation where the two ships are evading the asteroids whilst the interceptor tries to line up a shot on the remaining A Wing.

In Maya, if I wanted an object to disappear after it was destroyed within the animation, the hidden tag wouldn't work else it would hide the object throughout the animation. I decided to move the objects to a far away location within the world space that wouldn't make them visible while the rest of the animation played.

The canon fire shots were done using the same trick, I moved the shots to a far off location a single frame after they had hit the ship to give the effect that it had hit and it was no longer within the world space.

Rendering the animation was a pain as the render took place in 30 FPS, different to the 24 FPS that Maya had said was "Real Time". The 30 FPS was set as a Frame Modifier of 1 so I decided to chop it down to 0.8 as this was 80% of the total frame rate I had accounted for, making the video clip exactly 30 Seconds Long.

Starting the Animation

For the animation, I created a simple story board that would detail what would happen in my 30 second animation, the story board does have explanations below each frame on what is going on and is relatively easy to follow.

Going through the playback settings for Maya's camera window, I had found that Maya has an option to playback in realtime (24 FPS - Frames Per Second) about 80% of what I had predicted (30 FPS). This means I would have to create 720 Frames, luckily Maya moves the objects within the world space automatically so if I created nice motions between 10 and 20 frames, Maya would do the rest and move the ships in a smooth pattern.

One of Maya's features that I had found was that you can change the view windows on 4 View Mode to 2 Views and then change one of the windows to the camera that had been created for the animation, making it allot easier to edit and view what the camera was seeing whilst being able to edit frames for the animation.

The Vulture Droid

The Vulture Droid is a weird shaped ship which doesn't have a propulsion system (exhaust) and is a very similar shape to the Tie Interceptor, instead of being created from cuboid shapes, the Vulture Droid was primarily created from spherical objects.

The wings were the first of the ship that I had created, being made from cylinders that had been thinned out and cut into the weird shape that the vulture droids have. It seems that vulture droids do have joints that connect to the body when they are in a standing mode but do not when they are in a flight mode, because I was just creating the flight mode of the ship, I decided to not create the joints for the ship.

The main body was created from a disc shaped item that had been pulled to be a more oval shape and a sphere that had been cut and stretched to create the flat body shape that the vulture droids have.

The colour for the Vulture Droid was chosen to be brown, again one of the lesser colours that had appeared on google.

The Tie Interceptor

The Tie Interceptor is very similar to the Tie Fighter that I created on my first attempt, the cockpit design for the Interceptor is the exact same as the Fighter minus the canon positions as they are on the wings instead of the underside of the cockpit.

I made the same base structure as before withe a different wing shape, this time using the cut tool to point out and bend the wings into the Interceptor's signature shape.

Extruding the black panels onto each wing was a massive pain, it ended up causing massive problems with panels being not only inverted but also it automatically replicating panels, removing panels and also not allowing me to fill in holes. An online search told me several options that I could try but unfortunately nothing worked, after messing around with the detach and reattach features of different faces, the model allowed me to finally fill some holes and finish the extruded detail on the wings.

In the picture above is one of the voids that I wasn't able to fill until I had messed around with other faces nearby, I think the problem was to do with the whole wing being made from a single cube shape and being manipulated to not only be bent but also be a totally different shape with a large gap in the center.

After looking at different photos of Tie Interceptors, the cannons were sneakily hid into the wing design by what looked like a long pipe being tucked away under the extruded panels and being welded to the wings points.

Creating the A Wing

The A Wing is a simple shaped ship consisting of a cuboid with stretched out sides that is thinner at the front with a slight split in the middle. The simple shape of the ship wasn't actually easy to create as I had to make each of the pieces from different shapes that were cut either using cut tools or using booleans to cut shapes.

I thought to create the front of the ship first, cutting the split was easy work as was splitting a cylinder and separating the two objects that had come from the separation.

Adding a few smaller shapes and cutting some cylinders to create the exhaust design that is unique to the A Wing as it has a separation that is held together by fins.

Adding the fins was made easy by cutting into a rectangle several times to create an arc shape that could be cut out and faces reapplied and filled to make a smooth curve close to that of the A Wing's fin.

Canons for the A Wing are very simple in the use that they are just made of a single cylinder that is thicker in different areas and is held onto the ship by another cylinder, this is probably the easiest canon out of the Star Wars ships that I have made so far and it doesn't look too bad on the ship.

The cockpit was created by cutting a cylinder, bending the cuts to create an arched shape and cutting out the bottom of the cylinder so that it wouldn't show through the bottom of the ship, this finishes the basic design of the A Wing.

For the colours of the A Wing, I decided to go with a blue instead of the standard red that is shown on most images related to the ship.

Start of the 2nd Attempt

So because I had failed the first attempt due to several reasons, I decided to take a different approach to the module, putting more research into the animation side of the module and spending allot more time with the animation due to having that side of the module as my weakest. One of my weak points last time was the lack of screenshots and updates in the blog so I found a new shortcut that made screenshots easier, Win + PrintScreen, this captures the whole screen and saves it as an image file without me having to paste it into a separate application and then saving it, this speeds up the process of screenshots and makes it less likely I'm going to lose where I am due to having to save a screenshot.

For the re-submission I also decided to make 3 different models, my last submissions were the Tie Fighter, Imperial Shuttle, and the Star Destroyer, two of the ships were very low quality (especially the Tie Fighter.) This time I have decided to go with the Vulture Droid, Tie Interceptor, and the A Wing, 3 very different ships, all can be seen on the mood board below.