Missile Launch, a hotel room to put my phone in....

For the second part of the scene i was able to remove all of the trees and focus on the top of the volcano, this removed a large amount of the memory usage and allowed me to render this scene much faster than normal.

This is the island with trees as used in the first animation sequence:

And this is the island without them as used in the second part of the sequence:

Once all of the trees had been removed and the system then had some speed to it, i could bring in the missile and create the animation. I created a lava layer out of a cylinider cut in half and then mirrored, i had placed this slightly higher than the lava in the first sequence, but of a rookie mistake that one. A black tube was then affixed under the lava to give a black inner for the base and a guide for the rocket to be sized to a nd then animated launching out of it. Below is the final rendered sequence before any after effects have been added.

On a search through the 3DS Max tutorials i happened upon a very handy tutorial for a hotel room which is included here: Hotel Room. More on that next week.

Animating and trees, lots of trees

Weeks 7 and 8 were focusing on learning some animation techniques and setting up the first section of the animation.

During the lecture we went through some basic animation techniques to make a box move, which was pretty simple as the animating tools are incredibly intuitive to use. I then went a little further and used the box to tip over and squash an unsuspecting ball that just happened to be in its way, here is the result:

A little rought but still pretty cool, was also my first attempt at using lighting.

When creating the island scene with the missile firing from the centre of the volcano, i decided to cut the scene in two, first doing the camera fly by across the water to the island and then to its summit and then to do the lava opening up and the rocket firing as a second animated section. This proved a little bit of a boon as i had just then decided to add a forest layer onto the island using some plam tree models that came from the disc included with my copy of the 3DS Max Bible. I got a little over enthusiastic and before i knew it i had well over 300 of these trees on the island. As you can expect this caused a rather large strain on the computer and stopped me being able to render the scene. A quick fix of deleting all of the tree trunks meant that the scene would render but it would take a very long time. 24 hours on a pretty powerful home computer to render out 25 seconds of footage was quite a test. Below is the final render of that part of the scene.

Camera panning

With all the assets in place i could relax for the last lecture befor the hand in dat and thats what i did, i decided to use the lecture tutorial to make a simple panning shot of the island. I placed a camera in the scene where i wanted it to start then used the auto key animation tool to slowly rotate the camera giving a nice view of the island: