Screencaps from final animation.

Handed in the animation yesterday, here's a few screenshots from the workspace;

This is how it looks on the outside. I used a Geosphere and applied a space texture to it for a background

This image shows where I placed four of my cameras - the fifth one is just above the screencap. I found the 'create camera from view' option to be very useful when placing cameras. It also shows the massive blue cube that I used as a stand-in for a kind of capital ship where the smaller ships take of from - in future, if I dont have a model of the capital ship I need to find a way to make something like this less obvious.

This is an attempt at a first-person view of the X-Wing. As I hadn't modeled the inside of the cockpit, I had to do with placing the camera just before , and make it look down on the nose a little.

Almost there....

Right now I've done the animation and placement of the cameras. Unfortunately I had to cut some stuff from my original idea due to time constraints, so the animation ends with the ships entering hyperspace.

So. here's the final shot of the animation! Now I just need to render it and edit the clips together.

Animation progress - 30 seconds!

After setting the correct time for the animation in 3ds Max, which is:

Animation length: 30 seconds

Framerate: 30 fps

I found out that 30 seconds... isn't as much time as I originally thought. The first 'scene', where the ships take off, ended up taking about 12 seconds, which nearly half the time I have. This is obviously too long, so I've sped things up so it only lasts about 4 seconds. This makes it look too quick for me, but I think anyone else would find the scene too slow and boring.

The planned sequence of events in the animation is;

1. Ships take off
2. Camera cuts to outside main Rebel ship as the squad zooms towards the camera
3. X-wing breaks down, causing the other two to slow down/stop.
4. One or both of the ships that are still working return to the base.

How this actually works out could easily change as I continue working on the animation though.