Animating a 3D environment

When adding animation to my environment I decided to keep it as simple as I could but at the same time have it so I could change and even cancel it when I wanted in case something was wrong or a particular animation did not feel correct. One of my major animation methods was adding path constraints to my objects such as the camera and VTOL models. By simple adding a line or circle and constaining the model to that ‘path’ it allowed me to move it anywhere on that line this was useful since I did not have to guess if something was moving in a straight line or was going to move into the wrong place, this made my animation very simple and effective in the end and was used when animating the camera and some of the other models.

When animation the robot arms on my city I used a bone structure with HI solvers. The bone structure was made separately from the model itself and used a parent/child structure, so whenever the parent bone moved the child bones would as well, this was done by linking bones together, by first choosing the child bone and then moving the cursor to the parent bone created the structure between the two. Once the HI solver was added as well animation was made without me having to move each part of the model separately. Afterward I linked the separate parts of the model together by using the attach tool in the editable poly interface. I then aligned the bone and the model together and used the skin option in the modify tab. I then selected the bones that I wished to use and then the model would move along with the bones. However the animation did not seem as smooth when some bones could influence parts of the model that they were not part of, I changed this by going into the edit envelopes option under the weight properties increasing the abs. effect to exactly one for each bone to each element of the new model. This made animation much smoother and gave that bone absolute control over that part of the model.

I also added a particle system to my environment to create a leaking pipe effect. this was done by adding forces to part of the world. This used a mixture of gravity, deflectors and PArry system the gravity would give the effect of the water flowing downward, the deflector would stop it from falling through the floor and the PArry created the water. The gravity force was very easy to use and responded well to the particle system. However the deflector was too powerful at first which launched the water the second it came in contact with the deflector, by changing the bounce and friction values this effect was reduced and was made to appear as normal water leaking. For this to be part of the particle effect it needed to be linked to the particle system in a similar way to the bones using select and link, this would stop the deflector and other forces from interfering with the wrong particle system or animation. Then I needed to texture the particle so it would appear as water, this was done by adding a blue diffuse colour and increasing the specular and gloss values as well as face mapping it to help round off the edges of the particles. However the water seems to flow out in a far too controlled way, I wanted to make it appear more random that it did so I right clicked the speed value in the PArry particle generation menu. I then assigned controllers such as Bezier float and noise float so that I could add noise to the speed of my animation, after right clicking the noise setting I was able to change its settings such as frequency and strength this gave a much better animation.