Evaluation of Work

So it comes to an end

Textures

Over all i think the video i create went well. They say familiarity breads contempt (i know what there talking about). The major problem i had was with one of the texture the fact that it gave a lot of screen tear this was kinda of a night mare and destroy the main quality of the overall video. To improve on this should i make a later video i would not leave creating that scene until the end of the video. Also i would try and use better textures.

Lighting

Lighting was an issue with the main lights turning off and me being unable to work out how to turn them back on this created a lot of darkness in the scene which hurt my animation a fair bit. This cause some scenes to be darker than others. I tried fixing it by adding additional lights to the scene but this increase render time and my hardware constraints seem to slow me down.

Models

the models i had create previously i felt were good how ever the trees i created for the scene i felt were not so great i was unable to work out how to create good leaves so i left them as squares. This reduce the quality of the scene but i felt it happen so faster unless you were told or looking for it they were hard to notice due to the dark.

Final Animation

The Final Count Down

So this is my final animation completed with laser beams, as well as explosively good animation. Hope you enjoy it.

Lasers

Who doesn't love lasers ?

Me :(

So you can create lasers in 3D max you simply get a metrial apply a texture with a camera filter attacked it. attach a glow effect to it and voilá laser beam done. Unfortunately for me i was struggling with lighting so i had to take a different approche. So i decided humm what makes good laser beams... Adobe After Effects with the" light saber V2" plug in by video copilot (Developed by Andrew Craymer) So i opened up after effects and installed plug in draped out the plugin onto the solid i created. (ctrl-Y) then set the stop watches on start point and end point for the light saber and animated the movement in there every frame i drag the light saber a little bit further along the path. This when i played it back created the illusion of the gun firing.

Jungle walking

Walking in the jungle

Render output of animation Max View

To create a more realistic feel to my animation i deiced to place my AT-ST in a jungle environment with huts and trees. This went well as i textured the trees, huts , floor and leaves. how ever were it started to fall apart is when i added lights into the scene. I found that when i added a light into the scene  3D stuido max decided that it would turn off the main lights. This was ok because i worked round it with adding in more lights. How every in the realistic display mode and in the max render window it looked amazing, however in reality the images that it produced were mark and poorly lit. To counter this when i placed it in my post production software of choice i had to turn the brightness of the clip up to full.  Above is an example of what the video looks like with the light before i change it.

Animating Legs

I've got Bone

Skeletal structure

Max allows you to create a skeleton and then attack it to you model/mesh this then allows you to edit and animate it with ease. In my animation i used this Technics to animate my AT-ST legs walking. I found it fairly simple. The problem with this was that when i was done i was unable to move the walker and have the legs move at the same time so i had to animate the world around it to make it look as if it was moving. 

Under View on X wing

Flip Side

I created a Sceen were the tie fighters are chasing the X-wing i used a camera shot from underneath to show the speed at which they were all traveling.

Creating the X wing Decent

Down to Earth

To create the X wing decent i took the xwing model and moved along with a camera  focused underneath it. this gave the illusion of it being much lager in scale the the object viewing it. I added lights underneath the X wing to show a reflective glare.