Shot 7

Shot 7
The seventh shot in my sequence was an interesting challenge. Using the unusual camera angle of a birds eye view to capture the action allows the viewer to look on with omniscience. While quite a satisfying to achieve in 3DS Max using a lesser known tool, I feel the final explosion shot would be considered the 'money' shot' over this - the last shot contains big explosions and fire effects.

Using the same process as the previous shot, the tow cable grows along the spline as shown below. For maximum efficiency, I also had the Snowspeeder itself follow this using a path constraint. While this saved time and was ultimately the neatest way to do it, it did result in the cable being pulled around far away from the leg. This can be accused by the length of the shot and suggesting that when the ship circles a second time it would tighten the cable. The snowspeeder required some rotating to make sure it started in the appropriate direction and continued to do so.

As shown  in the two images below the vehicle looks rather flat when flying. Though shown quite far away in the shot the movement does not too realistic. Experimenting with the parameters revealed a 'bank' option which tilts the object when going round a corner - much like a roller coaster would.

An issue arose when animating the tow cable to follow the snowspeeder. While complete accuracy was not required as the cable could 'hide' inside the snowpseeder model slightly, simply setting the end stretch amount to the same frame as the vehicle's final destination resulted in it being out of time and hence appeared to detach. This was solved by manually setting it's stretch amount along the spline every 10 or 15 frames to asure it was touching or slightly inside the snowspeeder. Considering this is a three second clip, this was not too much of a time consuming fix.

The finished sequence is shown below with some improvements made to the animation shown above. The model has been made smaller to be in more realistic proportion to the ATAT. The Snowspeeder also subtly banks as it goes along.
 

Good parts:

• Continuity with previous scene as the tow cable originates from the front right foot
• Interesting and unique tool used to create the tow cable
• Though subtle the guiding spline goes slightly up vertically as well as wrapping around which is confirmed in the following shot of the detached cable

Improvements:

•  More detail on the top of the ATAT as most is found on the side or front and is hence hidden by this shot. However, I feel my other shots sufficiently show all angles of the ATAT
• More realistic wrapping around of tow cable using separate spline, though lining this up with the path of the snowspeeder could be problematic