Week 11 - Workaholic Week

Scene Three Begins!

For scene three, I reused the file from number two (and I did the same for scene four too!)
I removed all the path constraints from the scene as I could have the ships not be moving, and it would look nearly the same since they'd all be going at the same speed. To give the illusion of movement though, I added a new animation layer (not without several crashes) just as Mario had showed us, and used the noise XYZ tool to create a slight rumble on the X-wing.

Also, to make the viewer feel like they're more in the position of the pilot, I've added a crosshair made of two planes that are self-illuminated and have a nice red glow.

Then when I dragged the scene around to see how it would look, I found there was something missing, so I added two circles that would close in to show the targeting more clearly. Originally I had them close in at the same time, but by accident when I was trying it out I dragged the bigger ring in quicker so it overtook the smaller one, and it looked really good, so I ended up sticking with that. In addition, when I was creating the lasers again (as they lost the glow I made for them back in scene 1 as a practice) I realised the X-Wing lasers' were red, so this would be camouflaged with the red crosshair. I decided to make the crosshair self illuminated neon green from that point, as that's a fairly common colour for a HUD or aiming system.

I didn't know at this point how to make the opacity change with keyframes so I had the lasers start at 1% on their paths, so they'd ping back out of view as soon as they reached the end. This worked fine for the scene, but as you'll see in the next scene I had to learn how to change opacity quickly.

A feature I really liked when I was doing the path constraints was the ability to pull them around one point at a time just like the editable polys. This made planning paths so much easier as I could align the Tie's path to the very tips of the X-Wing lasers.

As you can see here in the faint blue square there's a path leading from the tie fighter of the screen. As I couldn't do opacity yet this was the method by which the Tie Fighter left the screen in an instant. I keyframed one end at one frame, then keyframed it at the off-screen other end on the next frame. This appeared to work perfectly too!

At this point there were no explosions as I hadn't looked into them yet, and when I asked Chris if he knew a solution he said that they could be done in premier pro. (Though as you'll see further down, I did learn how to do them in 3DS max, and that will be how they are in the final version.)


Scene 4 - Final Scene

After loading in my finished first 3 scenes into Prem Pro and cutting out 100% useless parts to make myself some time I was left with about 8 seconds. Which completely derailed my storyboard even further, there would be no epic battles and swoops and weaving and dodging lasers. I was then looking at doing side-on shots from the distance showing the ships firing at each other, and then the Tie's exploding as they went past. All this would be on the diagonal like a Dutch angle to make it look uneasy and replicate something similar to the single stroke battle. However, this really didn't look good from the side, so I tried seeing things from the Tie-Fighter's point of view and I had the idea that both Tie's could be shot, and then career into each other, exploding as the X-Wing flew 'into' the camera, which would give a cut to black easily.

 While I was still on the diagonal single stroke battle concept  I made up the above scene, but then I thought: Why not just make the camera diagonal? It would make the laser placement so much easier.
So I made everything relatively flat, and I think that helped a lot even after I changed the idea slightly.

You can see in the shot above the paths of the lasers in green. At this point I'd made the X-Wing rotate (in one failed attempt I accidentally made it do two barrel rolls, and it was spinning like crazy!) I just had to make the lasers disappear again. So I HAD to learn how to do the opacity, and after a LOT of crashing (every time I'd open the dope sheet or try to assign controller, or add keys)

Eventually after many many tries it worked, and it was so much easier than I realised, and for such a good effect!

Now, with all the scenes complete I had to add explosions. And really there isn't much to say that this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRyFJ9kK1ko doesn't cover. I simply used the tutorial on the explosion in the second half of the video to create all the explosions you'll see in next week's post, and in under 15 minutes I'd added explosions to both scene 3 and scene 4, and they looked amazing. It was annoying that they only showed up at render time, but I could simply render single scenes or groups of 5 etc. To see the effect. I think they work really well, and they're so effective.

I'll have to learn after-effects in premier pro another day!