Major Project 15 - Even More Drone Animation

I'm nearly finished on the drone animation now. It has been really fun animating all these shots, more-so than I expected. The shields have been one of the more satisfying parts in the way that I can make them react to each other and slam into each other (which the sound design should hopefully accentuate in a nice way). They can react to the many different needs and makes a good more visual interest to the drone, otherwise they would likely just look to static. 

I am currently working on the final explosion of the mrk 4 drone. I am doing this in the same way as the first drone destruction because a dynamic simulation was proving more trouble than it was worth. This was much more fun than the first time because it was a much bigger explosion and the pieces scattered much farther. I made sure to keep the trajectory of the laser blast and the drone itself. 

Since the pieces are falling from much higher, I thought it would be cool if some stuck into the ground instead of just landing and bouncing. I mainly kept this to anything that looked sharp or heavy. 

I can then use this document, combined with the first explosion to create the leftover rubble on the ground the ending sequence. This should be fairly easy once I have finished animating all the parts of the mrk4 drone. 

Also this week, I revisited the bricks from shot 53 when Liam shoots a hole in the wall. I had spent a lot of time trying to give these bricks dynamic physics which was just taking up too much of my time so I have again decided to manually animate these bricks. I am disappointed in myself that I haven't ended up using these kind of techniques, but they have just been causing me more trouble than they're worth. In most situations, I would keep persevering to figure it out, but as I am starting to get a bit more worried about the schedule, I feel that animating these elements manually was more time efficient for me at this time.