Hey guys, I love the idea of the weekly cinematic exercises! Here’s a quick cutscene I put together in my spare time to demonstrate a few features.
Shot 1
I have two banshees on a path, nothing fancy there. I copied and pasted the path to make sure they’re in sync, then selected all the markers and offset them using the Translation Manipulator. I also used Edit Camera and Auto Key to animate the shot a bit. Finally, I attached a smoke effect to the two banshees so that as they flew they created a smoke trail (yes, there's smoke in space!).
Shot 2
I simply created a camera looking out the back of the banshee. The banshee itself is still (other than the stand animation, which has a nice bounce. I animated the roll on the camera to exaggerate the effect, then I animated the skybox further away to make it look like we were moving. It was more convenient to set that up than to animate both the camera and banshee. Movie magic!
Shot 3
This was easy – I added a banshee portrait model, looked through the camera of it, made a copy, re-framed it a little, and extended the far clip so we could see the sky box behind her. I also put a second animation layer of HappyEyes with a long blend right at the end to give her some emotion.
Shot 4
This one’s a little more complicated. I started with five duplicated two-point paths to get the banshees all flying away. I then added a few additional markers to the left one and had it pull up so the banshee would fly out. I duplicated that and manually mirrored the points so that both outer banshees fly away at roughly the same time. I then animated Rotation Y (roll) on the center banshee to give it a barrel roll. Using the curve editor, I pulled on the custom tangents to cause it to go the wrong direction at first, then overshoot, then correct itself. There’s only two keys there, but by playing with the curve, I gave it a more realistic spin.
Finally, across all shots I used “Active For Shot” so that the models only appear in the shots they’re supposed to, and I kept organized by separating each shot into a different folder. That’s it! The whole thing took me about fifteen minutes to put together.
I attached the final cutscene so you can see for yourself.
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Hey guys, I love the idea of the weekly cinematic exercises! Here’s a quick cutscene I put together in my spare time to demonstrate a few features.
Shot 1
I have two banshees on a path, nothing fancy there. I copied and pasted the path to make sure they’re in sync, then selected all the markers and offset them using the Translation Manipulator. I also used Edit Camera and Auto Key to animate the shot a bit. Finally, I attached a smoke effect to the two banshees so that as they flew they created a smoke trail (yes, there's smoke in space!).
Shot 2
I simply created a camera looking out the back of the banshee. The banshee itself is still (other than the stand animation, which has a nice bounce. I animated the roll on the camera to exaggerate the effect, then I animated the skybox further away to make it look like we were moving. It was more convenient to set that up than to animate both the camera and banshee. Movie magic!
Shot 3
This was easy – I added a banshee portrait model, looked through the camera of it, made a copy, re-framed it a little, and extended the far clip so we could see the sky box behind her. I also put a second animation layer of HappyEyes with a long blend right at the end to give her some emotion.
Shot 4
This one’s a little more complicated. I started with five duplicated two-point paths to get the banshees all flying away. I then added a few additional markers to the left one and had it pull up so the banshee would fly out. I duplicated that and manually mirrored the points so that both outer banshees fly away at roughly the same time. I then animated Rotation Y (roll) on the center banshee to give it a barrel roll. Using the curve editor, I pulled on the custom tangents to cause it to go the wrong direction at first, then overshoot, then correct itself. There’s only two keys there, but by playing with the curve, I gave it a more realistic spin.
Finally, across all shots I used “Active For Shot” so that the models only appear in the shots they’re supposed to, and I kept organized by separating each shot into a different folder. That’s it! The whole thing took me about fifteen minutes to put together.
I attached the final cutscene so you can see for yourself.