Easter-Changes to ident 2 part 4

There are several areas of this ident which I am not happy with and so I will attempt to improve these areas to an acceptable level. I felt the movement of the ground was not quite right as the grass did not appear to move at the same pace as the other objects. I therefore grouped all the elements on the ground and redid the movement using auto key.

Afterwards I went on to redo the bear as whilst working on this part of the ident last time parts of his body became deformed. To resolve this I merged the bear again and scaled it to the same size as the original bear. I then used the bones to make the bear in the same position as before.

When I was happy with the bears positioning I deleted the original and attached the new bear to the balloon so it was also animated.

The animation was good at this point, but I still felt it needed more. So, I decided to try to add clouds as I felt this would really help to show how high the bear was as well as add realism. I did not know how to do this and so researched creating clouds in smax on the internet. I found a good tutorial at http://library.creativecow.net/articles/lacle-greg/clouds.php.

I then tried to make a cloud in my scene. To do this I firstly drew out a box gismo in the scene. I made sure it covered the whole of the ground area as I did not want the edge of the cloud to be evident during the animation.

Next I went to the environments and effects window and applied a volume fog to the gizmo. I made several alterations to the settings so that it was exactly how I wanted it.

The last step was to animate the cloud at the same rate as the ground.

I am now happy with this part of the ident, especially as parts of the bear’s body are no longer deformed.