Scene and Rendering
To set the scene up I created a new scene and imported all the models I had created and mapped into Maya, then grouped the appropriate items together.
The items i used were the 3 Ships plus one varient of the Tie-Fighter which i dismantled and made to look destroyed.
Camera Placement:
I used 6/7 different cameras in my scene using the Camera sequencer tool to create a range of shots from different angles.
Cameras 1 - 7 were placed around the scene for all the different shots i had planned and then keymapped to move during the frames i had specified.
For example the first camera is a static camera that was placed facing the main planet with the sun shining towards the camera which the entering ship would then block out for a good effect.
Lighting:
The scene lighting was kept minimal where needed to give it a natural and realistic lighting set up. Originally the scene was set up with the sun being the only source of light, however in the test renders i had used the lighting was to dim and increasing the intensity only made some scenes impossible to see whilst others were far to bright making the models look white.
After some testing i decided to use a spot light and area light with a low intensity to light the specific areas in the scene that the ships would be in, with the lights in the correct position to show where the sun is pointing from without having to edit the sun's light settings.
Motion:
There are actually 1050 frames in my scene as one scene was cut out due to it adding to much time to the render without giving enough of the story, therefore the scene was left in the editor but not rendered in case in the future an extended version could quickly be made from it.
The models have only been used once throughout the whole clip, I considered using multiple models in different area's so that i had more control over speed and placement in each scene however i decided against that and instead used a single frame at the end of each scene to move each model and item into their correct position for the next section of the render.
Rendering:
Each scene had to be rendered by a section of frames as I did not realise until I had already set the cameras up that by using the camera sequencer would cause all cameras to render every frame in the scene even when they had been sequenced during certain frames.This was not difficult to fix however as in the rendering settings i just had to tell the renderer to only use certain frames for each camera then stitch them together in another movie editing software.
During the first few attempts the file sizes were 1.2GB each which meant that using them raw would take up to much space for a simple 30 sec render.
At this point i changed the rendering type and settings to .Avi but using a different compression method was able to get each file down to less than 30MB.
Overall:
In the end this was a fun project to complete, however I found lighting to be alot harder than i had expected. It caused several hours worth of trouble shooting to fix in the end. However now I am able to much quicker produce results and renders that i would be happy with.
