Week 7 - Animation and Motion Paths
This week's workshop was all about animating within Maya, which mainly involved keyframing and motion paths. This was familiar ground as keyframing is essential in most video formats. This workshop I had the most trouble with, as I was plagued with technical and rendering issues. I fully lost some files during rendering which left me with some missing elements.
I had attempted to animate the demo car with motion paths, shown in the workshop, but lost the files to a crashed Maya during the rendering process. I ended up just showing the technique in the plane exercise below.
So I implemented a motion path for a second plane in the original plane scene.
I keyframed the original plane with rotation and movement to fly past the camera. I also made the motion path for the plane to fly over the same camera so it looked like one of the planes was trailing the other.
From this, I spent several hours rendering the scene but the final files were confusing. However much I changed the render settings, the files would render as .EXR regardless. This was not ideal as the EXR files would look like this in After Effects, where the shadows were now a big black shape. I rendered it twice only to result in the same problem. So I ended up having to render the frames individually as jpgs, which took even more time.
I took the final images into After Effects and added a camera shake just so that the final video looked a bit more cinematic and not too static and simplistic.
Here is the final outcome. It was a little bit of a struggle to get here but I managed to export an animation of the plane. I was able to utilise motion paths and keyframing but the rendering really was difficult and time-consuming.















