Progress Diary: Shot Five

Shot Five

The focus of this is shot is to introduce the conflict between the two characters. It is a wide shot to capture all of the action including what the ATAT is shooting and also the interaction between the encroaching Snowspeeders and the ATAT. There is also a slight high angle looking down to suggest the tides might be turning and the Snowspeeders may be about to win.


The blaster bolts were created in the same way as the practice test. The advantage of using keyframes for animation means even things that don't have obvious movement e.g. cameras or effects like this can be moved in the same way. The animation manipulates the cylinder, and the glow applies to it's material. This was also a simple animation as it only needed it's start and end position defined. However there was flexibility here to delay when the shoot happens by making another keyframe at the desired frame using the start position. This meant it would only move toward the end position from this frame.

 An issue arose when animating the bolt in terms of the visibility of the object. The object needed to only be visible when moving however remained visible when stationary. After some research, I found that a visibility track can be added in the curve editor. This meant I could specify the exact frames I wanted the bolt to be seen. This required some tweaking however. The curve editor naturally creates a curve between two points so simply setting viability to 0 on the first frame and 100 on the first movement would mean it would slowly fade in to full visibility. The solution to this was to have the frame before the movement be set 0 and then have a linear gradient toward 100 in the space of frame thus minimising the transition. I was able to quickly duplicate the first bolt and move it's position with it only requiring offseting the visibility and timing of the movement to shoot at a different time. 

 

The first attempt shown below had some issues. The movement was too fast as it shows all four legs moving. While I chose to keep this for the first shot to exaggerate the movement, it seemed out of place in this high angle view. The second gif shows these improvements.

The full sequence is shown below in this gif:

Good parts:

• Use interesting effects such as glow which stand out against white background
• Realistic movement with slow ATAT 
• Show full scene with power generator and resolves ATAT's purpose of walking e.g. shooting power generator

Improvements:

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