Animation

I decided that i would animate the create the whole of the animation first, then add cameras to follow the action that happens during the animation.

First in the animation was making the tank move towards the tower in a curve. to do this i created a curved line leading towards the tower, applied the tank on a path constraint to the line. Then edit the the time for the end of the tank movement so that it finished at frame 600 instead of the end of the animation.

Next was making the cannon ball move towards the tower. this part was simple, just adding a key frame at 600 where that cannon ball starts, and another at 820 when that cannon ball hits the tower. the difficulty was that the cannon ball was there before the tank. So to stop this i made it invisible at frame 0. It took a few attempts, but eventually i realised that to make it visible again i needed to use auto key while changing a frames visibility to 0.1, then the next frame visibility to 1. Using set key to edit the visibility does not change any of the future frames, it is just visible for the frame that you change, whereas auto key makes the object visible for the rest of the animation. If i was to do this again then i would ensure that the tank hits higher up on the tower by scaling up the tank, scaling down the tower and editing the texture on the tower so that the bricks aren't so big.

To make the crack animation i first attempted importing the crack image with a transparent background onto a plane, but this did not work as it put a white background around the crack. To solve this issue i used the same technique as for the leaf shown earlier in the blog, which involves importing the image into photoshop, selecting the around around the image using the magic wand tool, creating a new layer, filling in the selected area black, adding another new layer, filling in the area where the original shape would be white, then deleting the layer with the original image on. Opening the maps section on the material editor and importing the black and white image into the opacity section of the maps tab. this meant when i used the texture on the plane it has a transparent background which causes the image to look like a crack in the wall. After this i had to shrink the crack plane  so that it was behind the ball when it hit the wall, scale it to the size of the crack, curve the plane so that it fits the shape of the tower, re shrink to the size required for starting the animation. Then repeat the steps used for the cannon ball so that it was invisible up until the image is needed. Finally when the cannon ball hits it scale it up so that it looks like the crack is growing.

The next step was making the man jump off of the top of the tower. First i used the preset biped animation to make him jump over the wall around the top of the tower.

Next was scaling the parachute, this again involved making the parachute invisible bfor it was required. followed by scaling and rotating it as it expanded on his back.

Following this was making him float away, theproblem was that the feet were still stuck to the jump animation of the biped which mean that while his body was moving away the feet and legs were trailing behind at an almost right angle to his back. My first attempt to solve this was to not just the jump animation and make him move manually, but this was not very realistic. So i figured out that if i added a new layer then moved him on the new layer then it would move the whole model including the feet. This also had a problem that when i moved something in the new layer it affected previous sections of the time line, to fix this i had to use set key to edit x, y and z axis a tiny bit just to add a key frame at the beggining of the animation, then another after the jump animation so that the new layer knew were the model should start from and wouldn't edit anything before the jump animation. Actually making the model float away was simple as it was just moving it to a new location and adding key frames.

Finally was making the parachute follow the man as he floated away. what i should have done is linked the parachute to the man model, this would have meant that it followed him perfectly as he floated away. But i could not do this as i had already scaled the parachute to expand. So i had to slowly follow the man with the parachute adding a new key frame every 20 frames to correct its position. Then at frame 1268 zoom into the canvas on the parachute to end the animation.