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.