Week 8-Starting ident 3 part 4

I feel the ident has gone well so far and so I am going to continue to work on it for the rest of the week, but before I start animating this ident I must create the wand. For this I drew out a long, thin cylinder with a radius of 2.307 and height of 43.522. I increased the number of segments in length to 12.

I then created the materials for this in the material editor. For both the black and white I used the anisotropic shader. I wanted it to be a shiny, plastic like surface and so set the specular to 100, glossiness to 60 and anisotropy to 50.

Next I made the shape into an editable poly and chose the polygon icon. I then selected the polygons of the cylinder in groups and applied the different colours to the areas.

Finally I scaled the shape down to a more realistic scale before I exported it. When scaling the shape I reduced the radius more than the length as I felt that it was currently too short.

Next I went on to create the file ready for the animation and so imported the ground, fence and robot before scaling them until they were in proportion to one another. Then I imported the wand and scaled it down so it fitted into the robots hand well.

I then rescaled the timeline, setting it to 90 frames in length as I planned for this to last for 3 seconds in total.

Afterwards I drew out a spline with the line tool in the shape of the arc. I set the line drawing tool to smooth so that I would get a fluid shape once drawn. To get the line exactly as I wanted I edited some of the vertex points as an attempt to get it as smooth as possible.

Next I selected the super-spray particle system and placed it in the scene. I set the emit type to trail. Then I added this to the line as a path constraint.

When I played this it emitted and followed the line well, apart from the fact that it lasted for the whole of the timeline. To resolve this I moved the key frame from frame 90 to frame 30. This part was now how I had planned for it to be.

I then set it to only emit between frames 0 and 30 as well. I also made other alterations to the settings. Firstly I set the speed to 0.5, and left the variation at 20 and life at 15.

Afterwards I created a hedra as I felt it would be a really good shape to be emitted. I started by drawing it out and applying a gold material to it. For this material I used the anisotropic shader and made the specular level 200 and glossiness as 10.

Lastly I set it to be emitted from the particle system.

I then repeated this process with two new, different shaped lines. The first was a straight, diagonal line while the other was a wiggly line. I applied a different super-spray emitter to each. Finally I set each motion path to play through different sets of 30 frames.

Next I rendered the animation, but felt it was not right. Firstly I felt there were not enough shapes being emitted and so increased the rate to 300. Also, I moved the start and end points for each motion path together so that there were a few frames gap between the start and finish of each. I increased the spray spread to 180 and reduced the particle size to 0.5. Finally I made it fade for 10.

These changes made the animation section much better, but it is still not perfect. I will continue to work on this during the week and hopefully get it to a point I am happy with.