City Invasion

So finished up animating my scene. At first I had the whole sequence as a still shot with a little camera wiggle, but later I decided add in a more handheld camera feel, full with the rack focuses and stuff.

Little breakdown of what's going on here: I had the cutouts of all the ships but this time I cut out the tall building foreground to put the 2nd ISD behind (I even named them!) I then did some simple animations to get a feel for the movement of all the ships (I really wanted to emphasize the hugeness of the ships so I had them move really slow). It was also really important that I get the engine heat distortion set up so I worked on that first - I added a particle system (2 on top of each other) and then used them to act as a displacement map for the Destroyer. Since only the leftside engine would be visible I only did the engine distortion on that side - I had tried to do make some engine glow but that ended up not working well since I couldn't play the light off the hull. I then parented the particle system to the engines and made them 3d layers so I could push it back.

The next big item was the helicopters. I took the cutout (it was the whole chopper) and split it into 2 layers - one of the body and one of the rotor blades. I made the blades 3d layers and keyframed them to rotate around, then precomposed them and duplicated. I did the same for the 2nd helicopter body - I had them separated as the Military chopper (screen left) and the 4 "news" choppers.

I added in the TIE fighters squadron too and had them drop down from the shadow of the ISD "hull".

Finally the last touches were precomposing the entire scene and putting it into a slightly smaller composition - to give room for the camera wiggle and handheld stuff. I made the composition wiggle on it's own, but after adding a 3d Camera I also put a wiggle expression on the z-orientation. Finally checked all the motion blur on and animated the camera - unfortunately I didn't have a realistic lens focus effect so I just added a gaussian blur and manually keyframed it once the camera moved. After several test renders and tweakings here's the final product!



City Invasion from kabraz on Vimeo.