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.