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.