Scene 3 creation

Scene three was one of my most complicated scenes. This scene animates one of the siege engines falling over and breaking apart. In order to create this scene I started with scene two and then edited the scene. I started by removing all but one of the models of the siege engines. Then I altered the grouping of the siege engine, making the top half and the bottom half group separately. This was to allow the siege engine to break in two when it falls over. Then I animated the siege engine moving forwards. This was done by selecting both the top and bottom segments and moving and rotating them together. The top half would then need slight alterations in order to keep it in the correct place in perspective with the bottom half of the siege engine.

I then frame by frame animated how I visualised the siege engine falling apart. This was a very time consuming process. This was because it was very hard to make the siege engine breaking apart look natural. One of the main problems was that certain stages of the siege engine breaking apart played too quick, and others played too slow. This meant that I had to move certain key frames, making each animation segment shorter or longer.

The next stage of the animation was to create the camera for the scene and delete the old camera that was still there from scene two. To start with I drew the line that I wanted the camera to follow, and moved and rotated it into place. Then I created a free camera and attached it on the line that had just been drawn. This was done using a path constraint. Once the camera had then been set up, with the correct stock lenses and pointed in the correct direction, I noticed that the background image was not large enough for the scene. This meant that the background image needed to be scaled up so it was taller. This did not cause too many problems with the quality of the image because I only wanted to show the sky in the background (which is predominantly blue, meaning I would not be distorting the shape of anything visible in the image).

Once the camera was set up the lighting was added. A daylight system was added to the animation. The daylight system was angled with the direction and tilt to cast a realistic shadow for a scene set in the evening. This was consistent with all the other scenes. Once the lighting was addend I watch the animation numerous times. I then made a number of slight tweaks to the animation to make the scene look more natural and fluent. This included alterations to how the siege engine broke apart and the speed in which the camera moved (in order to keep up with the siege engine falling). The final stage was to render the scene, play the animation and then edit the animation with a few tweaks to make the animation seem more realistic. Once I was happy with the animation I created my finally uncompressed render of the scene in 1280 by 720.

The images bellow show scene 3 of my animation: