Wednesday 14 December 2011

Filming - Shot 10 (View of TIe Fighter)

The next shot I wanted to create was to show off the detail on the Tie Fighter. For this scene I decided to use a new timeline as it was going to be a completely different shot.

For the first part of my animation, I just wanted the Tie Fighter to continue to move straight forward. So, I set up the camera and the ship in the right starting position at the beginning of the timeline. I then just had to create another key frame at the end of the timeline of where I wanted the last position of the ship to be. This created a basic shot of the ship moving forward, moving away from the camera. 

However, this time I wanted the shot to be moving and more immersive. In order to achieve this, I thought I would create another line to use as a path. Only this time, I would have the camera moving along it rather than the ship to create a more interesting shot. 

To carry out this shot, I create a line first by going to the 'Create' menu at the top, then 'Shapes' and 'Line'.

 With the line now selected, I drew a rough line of the camera path I wanted in the viewport away from the sky dome area, so that I could see it clearer. Once I had my line drawn, I then repositioned it using the 'Move' and 'Rotate' tools, so that it was correctly positioned on the scene. I had to rescale it slightly too as it was a bit too big.


I made sure that the beginning of the line was where I had the camera already positioned. This meant that when I turned the line into a path the camera wouldn't move out of place.
Now that my line was in the correct place, I wanted to change it slightly so that the camera would move in the exact line I wanted. With the camera selected, I went to the 'Modifier Panel' and clicked on the 'Line' level. 


I then clicked on the 'Vertex' option so I could see all the vertex's on the line to change them. Using the 'Move' tool, I moved some of the points slightly so they where where I wanted them and were at the right angel to get a good shot of the Fighter. 

Once I had my line looking how I wanted, I now wanted to make it into the camera path. To do this, I went to the 'Motion' Panel on the right.


Under the 'Assign Controller' section, I selected 'Position' and clicked on the small icon above the panel to bring up the 'Assign Position Controller' window.


In the new window I selected 'Path Constraint' and 'OK'. I was now able to select 'Add Path' under the 'Path Parameters' section. 


Once clicked, I selected the line and this now linked the camera to the path. Now when I moved the bar across my timeline, not only would my Tie Fighter move forwards, but my camera followed the path of the line too.

However, because I had used a 'Free' camera rather than a 'Target' camera, my camera did not have a fix focus on the ship. So, the camera would start out my targeting the ship but then it would move completely out of shot. This wasn't too much of a problem as I thought I would just move the camera manually myself instead.

I started at the beginning of my timeline and gradually worked my way through the shot, making sure that the camera was focused on the ship. I used the 'Rotate' tool to adjust the camera. The positive of using a free camera is that I got to completely choose the shots I wanted of the fighter, so I made sure that you could see each aspect of the fighter in detail. 

Also, I'd already created many frames in my timeline, and changing the camera angle continuously was quite time consuming so I only changed about half of the timeline. I thought the part I'd changed would be long enough anyway as it showed all angles of the Tie Fighter already, so it wasn't necessary to show it from anymore angles.


Once I had finished animating and changing the camera angles, I rendered the clip. I made sure not to render my entire timeline this time because the last few frames weren't needed as I didn't want to use them. 

Here is what the clip looks like:


As you can see, the clip is not perfect. I wasn't completely happy with it but at the same time I really liked some of the camera angles. Because of this I wanted to keep and use this clip. 

The whole shot happened far too quick, however. This wasn't too much of a problem though. I thought I would just import it into Premiere and stretch out the duration of the clip slightly so you got more of a chance to see the ship. I could've stretched the clip out in 3ds Max by adding more frames, but I decided this would be too time consuming as I would have to reposition the angles of my camera all over again. 

Also, the camera is slightly shakey in some places, especially towards the end. I'd already decided I didn't want the very end of the clip because the Fighter goes out of scene for most of it. But again, I could just cut this out in Premiere to save much time re-rendering the clip.

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