Starting To Animate

Now that all of my modelling is finished, I have been working with Lydia to help get all the buildings arranged on Ford Island and Pearl Harbor.

SCREENSHOT TO FOLLOW

We have also discovered that adding trees to the scenery is extremely simple due to the AEC Extended Foilage objects, which has the palm trees we need, so this will save us all some work and give some extra detail to our scenery to make it look more realistic.

For the animating aspect, I have begun researching techniques for my focused area for animation, which is explosions. A useful tutorial that has been a good starting point is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDGUaw0XrDg
 

I will be making buildings explode as well as having bombs dropped, so having the skills to make objects themselves blow up into little pieces as well as just having general explosions is a good thing to begin practising with
Explosions use a particle system just like fire and smoke does, but they use thePArray rather than the Super Spray. The PArray then got linked to the object and used mesh particles as object fragments.

The next settings to be adjusted were to make the fireball part of the explosion. Using the Helpers tab under the Create tab, the Atmospheric Apparatus has a Sphere Gizmo, which is what allows the ball of flame to appear. There are different shaped Gizmos to play about with as well, which I will try out later on and see which ones look best for the animation. After this, a fire effect was applied from the Atmosphere & Effects tab. The settings for this can be adjusted, including the colours, size etc. as well as smoke and explosions being added. The size of the explosion itself can shrink and grow like any standard object using the Autokey when animating. To get the sphere to disappear, it was simply hidden, but the Gizmo stayed behind.
To show that the explosion is also a light source, an omni light has been placed inside the explosion, which is why the shadows on the pieces of the broken sphere appear on the outer parts of the pieces.
This tool seems fairly simple to use so I should be able to get to grips with this challenge fairly quickly, so learning my new skill for the animation part of this module should be successful.