Animating and Rendering Scene 1

A and R Scene 1
25/11/2016
Vasil Nikolov

Hello one and all to the second to last milestone in the journey. So far, I have heard that the animating and rendering would be the most challenging bit as Maya is not always the best at doing some editing styles. This is why, This first post will be a longer version on one scene and the others would mainly mention the failures encountered during their creation.

 As you can see for the animation, I used a path for both the camera and ships to follow. Getting the camera to follow was probably the hardest bit as Maya sometimes did not like looking through another view except the camera itself. This made timing the ships passing by while the camera is panning towards the moon they are passing much more difficult. Another challenge that was met was getting the sphere with a space image to work. Sometimes the texture would just not wish to work in the space that was given it. Nevertheless, thanks to a colleague (That I still owe a KFC), the sphere secrets were explained to me and in the future images, you will be able to see it.

Getting the ships to run together was the most fun bit because it meant that they needed to be grouped before they could be united in one and then added to the path. If I did know that I would need to do these two steps, I would have saved me an hour in wondering why they would merge as one ship once they were attached to the map.

A big "thank you!" should once again be expressed for my colleague Kain, who helped me with the art of modifying and centering the point to the new objects. This made the manouvres of the many items much easier to complete. 

 Maya was also kind enough to crash 3 times in the span of 10 minutes. This is why some of the renders took me a much longer time to complete as the software would crash just before the updated version would have been saved.

While not scene in the images, another tool that was used was the speed graph, which allowed me to times the sequence correclty and make the ships look like they were traveling appropriately.

Nevertheless at the end, the perfect render for the scene was achieved and the scene looked marvelous.

More updates would be comming in soon and hot.