Untitled Animation

So lately I've been working on this animation for the Northern Design Competition. The story is, put simply,  about the end of the Earth. Its a simple story, but I think it works quite well, what with all the global warming and natural disasters going on nowadays. The animation is set on Earth, at a launch site. and in space, which features all the planets, the Sun and even the asteroid belt ;) The launch site has been used from an animation I made earlier called Leaving Earth, but has been adapted to fit with the size of the new space shuttle.

Here are some renders, some of which are tests others are from the animation itself.

(Space Shuttle on the launch pad)

(Blasting off)

(Blasting off - camera attached to shuttle)

(Boosters detach, falling back to Earth)

(Earth and Moon silhouetted by the Sun)

(Saturn with Sun in background)

(Some of the planets orbiting the sun)

Ill be uploading the video soon so check back to see the final piece. Its looking good so far so im just hoping that it looks good when its all edited together. 

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