Major Project 12 - Drone Animation

Now that the textures are all completed, I can move on to finishing animation and rendering. The few shots that I had already animated before needed to have their animation copied onto the latest version of the model because the UV had changed. This was an extra hassle due to my haste to get onto animating while waiting for Dan to finish the drone. It wasted quite a bit of time, which was slightly irritating. There were only 5 shots where I had to do this so it wasn't too bad. The new animation on following shots is easy enough, as it is only the drones flying which involved just a handful of keyframes so it is going at a very quick pace at the moment.

The longest shot to complete so far has been 41 where the first drone explodes. I had experimented with some dynamic physics simulations but they weren't working well. The issue was that I wanted to be in control of where the pieces landed. Also, because all these piece on the body of the drone are so tightly packed, they weren't reacting naturally when becoming soft bodies, they just flew off in really unrealistic ways. In the end, while keyframing the pieces took a long time, I believe it gave me much more control and the fiddling I would have had to do to a simulation to get it how I wanted would have been just as much an effort. I am really happy with the result of this shot so I don't mind that it was a time consuming task.