Week 8-Finishing ident 3 part 4

To start this week I looked again at what I had already done. I felt that the shape of the sparks still did not look right and so changed it back to one of the preset shapes.

I then went on to start to animate the arm, but before I started I positioned the arm so that it held the wand properly. To do this firstly I used the rotate tool to make the palm of the hand touch the wand. Then I used the move tool to reposition the bones and make the robot hold the wand.

Next I moved the arm so that the wand pointed at the start of the first spline. I then turned on set key and added key frames so the arm followed the shape of the splines in turn. To do this added a key frame at the start and end point of each spline animation. Next I added a key frame and repositioned the arm at each point between the start and end points where the hand did not align with the tip of the emitting point. I did find that I needed to edit one part of the arm and then the other to make the alignment. I did find this difficult as the arm did not stretch as far as I needed it to, however I tried to do it as well as I could.

As I have animated the arm the wand is no longer in place. Therefore I used the auto key to realign the wand to the hand throughout the animation. I needed to place several key frames along the timeline to keep the wand in place. I was careful not to let it move up and down the hand at any point.

Afterwards I watched the animation and was quite happy with the work I had done, but felt the motionless arm was too rigid and ruined the scene. So I bent the arm in a way I thought looked realistic.

I then animated the bones in the second arm using the auto key, all the time trying to get the arms in a balanced position. All the positions I set for the arms I made look as realistic as possible.

To finish the scene I next added lighting. Firstly I added an omni light with an intensity of 1 and with shadows on. I then positioned it in the same position in the sky as before in other parts of this ident.

I then added a target spot light to highlight the robot. I positioned it so that the light pointed at the robot and set the intensity to 0.1.

Lastly I added a camera. I selected a target camera and placed it in the scene so the robot was in the centre of the shot. I made sure that only the important parts of the animation was in the scene, this being the upper half of the robot and the stardust paths.

When I was happy with the cameras position I rendered the scene.

I am quite happy with this part of the ident, but if I have time I will try to make the wands movement and super-spray emitter’s line up better during the animation.