Leaving Earth

I've finally finished my rocket animation, well I say i've finished it but to be honest I don't see this one going away that easily. I've learnt so much about Maya and so many new skills just from making this, so I'm probably just going to keep improving it and adding to it. That being said, I've edited it together in a short 1-minute animation which I've called "Leaving Earth".

Check it out here:

Theres a few things I still need to change. First of all is the first scene where the rocket takes off, I used a Physical Sun and Sky in mental ray. The problem I had with this was setting the ground using a texture, which kept flashing big squares, behind the mountain, every now and then. I think the reason for this is that it's stretched the texture i used to cover the floor making it very pixelated. To fix this I think I might just need to set the texture so that it tiles across the floor rather than stretching it. The next problem was with the space scenes. I used Paint Effects to get the stars and galaxies, which i painted on the inside of a NURBS sphere for a full 360 degree star field. The problem with this is that the Paint Effects don't show up when rendering in Mental Ray, which I was using to get the shiny effect on the rocket. So this meant that i had to render those scenes without mental ray, causing the rocket to lose its shininess. A solution i thought of was maybe rendering the rocket and planets out with a green or blue background using mental ray, and rendering the stars out on their own without mental ray. I could then use Adobe After Effects to put the two shots together, removing the green/blue screen.

Other than these few problems I had, i'm still quite happy with the overall look of the animation. I feel it has a slight 60s/70s animation look to it which goes well with the music which is widely recognised from   2001: A Space Odyssey.

I'll definitely keep going back to this one because its a personal project i've enjoyed working on and its taught me a lot about animation and using Maya. Hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Cheers

Blast Off News

After a lot more work on the rocket animation i've rendered out a short animation of the rocket blasting off. I've included the smoke/fumes, and I've used a motion path for the rocket to follow. Here's what it looks like so far.

I was quite impressed with the outcome of this render but there were a few things I wanted to change. Firstly was the colour of the smoke, rather than having it fade to black I decided it would look nicer fading to white, especially at the beginning before it takes off, when the smoke is collecting around the base of the rocket. Another noticeable error is roughly halfway through the animation the rocket rotates in a split second. I believe this was due to a keyframe i may have forgotten to delete.

As i write this blog, I'm currently rendering the updated version of this, which includes the white smoke, and the rocket doesn't randomly rotate. I have edited the graph to give the rocket a slower launch and accelerate at a high rate to give a realistic look. When the render is finally complete I will post it here to show the progress being made.

Once i'm satisfied with the take-off, I have a few things that I want to tweak. One of these aspects is the surrounding landscape, maybe a few buildings in the background, or some water nearby. I'm currently sketching some ideas, but once i've decided on the right look, then i can get started with the story of my animation.

Keep checking back for updates. Comments and feedback are more than welcome.

Shiny Rocket

So today i was doing a bit of brainstorming (or should I say "thought-showers", or whatever it is nowadays, to be politically correct),  and I decided I wanted to make a short animation about a rocket and some clouds. I don't want to give too much away, because no doubt it'll change a bit (or a lot) so best to keep the details to a minimum right now. So after doing some sketching I decided to start the modelling process in Maya. 


This is what i've got so far.

The rocket isn't complete yet but this is just a render I did to show the reflectivity of it, hence the green ball. Im quite impressed with this version of the rocket, but it might change a bit here and there seeing as this was just my first attempt.


Any feedback and comments are more than welcome.


Cheers.