Animations

After making the camera path to go into the doors of Hylands House, I needed to make the animation of the door opening. This was very easy because all I needed to do was used the auto key tool and open the door on a pivot. This looked very effective when it had finished. The image below shows the key frames for this animation.













I then wanted to create a small animation in front of Colchester Castle as it does not have any doors to open. I decided to create a small tourist in front of the Castle to make it seem more appealing. I tried on several occasions to make the little man walk past the castle but I had many problems with skinning and the feature on my version of the program. This held me back a lot and forced me to give up on the idea of the man walking. Instead I looked into how I could make the man take a picture of the Castle like the average tourist. This was quite difficult to do as the man did not want to do anything I asked it to do.

Firstly I set a small animation of the man raising his arms and pulling a small black box (the camera) to his face. This was difficult as the arms went all over the place when I set the simple animation. I solved this problem by grouping the whole arms structure and then animated the shoulders.













I then animated the camera making a small flash. This was not very simple to do as I did not know how to do this at all. Firstly I made a small target light from the front of the camera to the castle. I managed to find out that I needed to add a multiplier curve and then edit it so that it appeared on the frames that I set it as. The picture below shows how I did this.













After, I needed to animate the beach. The one thing that you always see at the beach is sea gulls. I decided to animate a sea gull flying through the sky in front of the camera. This was very simple to do, as was making the actual sea gull. It was made through simple uses of shapes and a multi/sub-object material. I did not want to put any details on the sea gull because the user would only see it for two seconds.