Monday, 6 December 2010

Animation Scene 3 – Red Arrows Stunt 1



This scene was created by firstly importing the Red Arrows plane and duplicating it to make another plane. A path was drawn using the line tool and then also duplicated to mirror the path onto the other side. Each plane was attached to one of the paths and with ‘set key’ enabled both planes were animated to make it look like they were going to fly into each other but turned at the last second. After a bit of adjustment in regard to timing the animation was created.

The skybox and sea were then imported in from the previous scene and the volume fog effect added to match all previous scenes cloud effects. I was originally going to use reactor to make the sea have motion, but since I had problems with reactor crashing my computer in the other scene I decided not to. As it turned out when I rendered the scene the water looks like it has motion due to the clouds moving and also the way the camera moves. Even if reactor had been used, the planes would have probably been moving too fast for the person watching to appreciate the wave motion.

A camera was positioned that would follow the plane from a view over the wing. Originally the plane was going to be placed inside the cockpit but it would have made the viewer feel sick from all the twists and turns the plane does. The view over the wing was a compromise as it still highlights the motion of the plane but is much easier to watch. A target spot light was added to the scene to illuminate the planes. The intensity of the light was turned down slightly to give a better shadow effect.

Finally the last effect I wanted to create in the scene was a fire effect for the afterburner on the jet. It is something I had not done before in 3ds Max and I had suggestions about looking at reactor and particle effects to create it. The simplest way I found was to use the same environment effects panel as used for the fog. A cylinder gizmo was created and a fire effect added to it in the environment effects panel. It took a lot of tweaking as it was impossible to see the flame in view port without rendering it. I found an online tutorial that suggested settings to make the flame flicker. The cylinder gizmo was then attached to the Red Arrows plane so the flame would follow its plane.

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