Zooming Starships: Case Study
The inspiration of this project started when I wanted to know how to make animation in 3D more fluid. I was never a good 3D character animator, so I stuck to motion graphics instead. The way that artists in that field could make basic shapes and text so appealing was fascinating to me. In the midst of this, I became fascinated in spline animation. The idea of making anything you want follow a path without a single key frame was a style of art that I could not see myself not using in the future. So, I watched some tutorials, and decided to commit to a project.
The bulk of this animation was made through the utilization of splines, a cloner, a single 3D model, and an alpha channel. Here’s an action frame of the sequence, followed by a picture of the 3D model used:
The purple-ness of the model is mostly reflected off of the violet lights I have placed within the scene. In order to capture all of them details of this model while portraying a motion that’s fun and energetic, I decided to use a spline that looked like this:
The curve needed to be a wide enough angle to allow for plenty of “space” for the ships to travel before they ultimately zoomed past the camera. I think I did a good job of portraying this in practice, but perhaps if I knew more about velocity dynamics in the emitter, I could have portrayed this better.
Speaking of which, the emitter was hooked up to a cloner, which was then applied to the starship model. The way this was done was by parenting the starship to the cloner, then setting the cloner to object mode, and finally, applying it to the matrix. The matrix would then be applied to the emitter (through Object > Object > Emitter) placed at the beginning of the spline.
From this, at first, came a number of problems. First of all, the cloner object would fail to properly flow through the spline, instead forming in edges of it until it filled up the full line. This was fixed when the Spline Wrap’s alignment tag was changed from its default “+X” to “+Z”. Now, each of the starships would fly through it properly.
Another problem was that the starships were not faced forward as they traveled through the spline. At first, they defaulted as flying wing-first through the path, or sometimes, even backwards. This entire process was actually a lot tougher than it might seem. I could have checked “Tangential” on Emitter for it to work just fine, but when I did, they flew in a generic, one dimensional motion. I thought that starships were a lot more fluid in their movement than simply following down the path headfirst, so I took to my own solution. It took a lot of tweaking of the ship’s original position, as well as a few keyframes of rotation for the emitter, but eventually, I got the ships to curve and tilt like they were really flying in space. To me, it looked much better than simply letting them follow down a path. To add further realism, I also added a 6% variation in speed, and a 1% variation in rotation (yes, that actually was somehow the best percent).
A few area lights were placed in front to light up the fronts of ships; I had originally tried infinite and omni lights, but I settled for area lights when they didn’t do the texturing much justice. From there, I exported the video as a PNG sequence in front of an alpha channel, then threw it on over to After Effects.
As you can see here, the background has been updated to a PNG of a starry night sky, which would be space in this instance. I have also taken to photoshop out a few of the larger stars to move in the background as the animation progresses, to give a greater 3D feel.
One interesting problem that I ran into during the post processing was in the hue/saturation. My professor, Dennis Recchia, had told me that the lighting in space made everything less saturated, so I had to take that into account. When I heard that, I thought, “the best way to go about this has to be to give the ships the colors I truly intended in 3D, then saturate it in post.” This worked, but when I did it, the thrusters on the backs of the ships changed color, as well. To fix it, I added a “Change Color” modifier to the ships, targeted the new “pale orange” shade of the flames, saturated it by 39.0, and changed the matching tolerance to 50%. This gave it its proper orange glow back without compromising any of the animation’s color.
You’ll also notice that there are two animations, and there’s a peculiar looking mask at the front of it. This is a post process mode where I blur out the ships in the background to make them look further away. Both of these have the same mask; the one called “Subtract” is set to that mask mode in order to cover everything outside of this zone.
In the end, I think I developed a relatively successful project. It was critiqued many times by both my professor and my peers, and I learned a tremendous amount of objectively important motion graphics knowledge through doing it. If I were to do this again, maybe at a time when I was much more experienced, I would most likely have the ships come out of a portal, or perhaps the bay of a much larger starship. I would also make use of Cinema 4D’s Motion Camera, the Vibrate tool on the camera, and the motion blur tool on the starships for a better project. As of right now, I am trying to grind out as many ideas as possible in the shortest amount of time to accumulate as much knowledge as possible, but I will surely come back to this concept eventually.
