Dev Blog #2

Thursday April 17, 2014

For the second blog that is required for my class, I am going to talk about how I made the cinematic for Phase 1 of our game. The cinematic consists simply of the spacepod moving upwards, to signify that it is starting its ascent to the jump altitude. This is a very, very simple animation as it just consists of a vertical translation of the spacepod over 100 frames. I chose to make the animation take 100 frames as it would slow down the speed of the animation. So, on with the details.

I first imported our spacepod model and its door into 3DS Max. In the same scene, I made a sphere object and converted it to an editable poly. I then scaled the sphere up uniformly to the size I thought would look good in the cinematic. I moved the sphere above the spacepod and focused my attention on the bottom set of faces. I highlighted those faces and extruded them down towards the spacepod. After I made the balloon and the spacepod "touch", I went ahead and attached the balloon to the spacepod using Max's Attach feature. This turns all of the different components into one model allowing you to do things to the model as a whole and not having to select each individual component. You would only do this after you were done working on each individual component and only if you wanted the model to be one component and not many components.

After I attached the balloon to the spacepod, it was time to start the animation process. I selected my model, changed to the Motion tab in the right hand side of 3DS Max and selected the Auto Key option. The Auto Key option allows you to just move the frame slider and adjust your model. It will mark the key frame automatically. So, the first frame is simply the spacepod on the ground. I moved the frame slider to the last key frame (100 in this case) and moved the spacepod up into the air. This caused the second key to be placed. Once this process was done, I went to the Render Setup menu to render out the animation. The easiest way to do this, if you want a video file of your animation, is to open the Render Setup menu, select the radio button that allows you to select a range of frames (0-100 in my case), scroll down until you see the Render Output section, click the Files button, change the output file type to a movie file (in my case, I used .avi), give your file a name and hit save. This will pop open a new window that will allow you to select a compressor for your file. I used the MJPEG compression, which cut my frames down to around 80 (this is ok, as it did not affect the speed of the animation. Just its file size). Hit the OK button and then click the Render button on the Render Setup window. Wait a few seconds/minutes depending on the complexity and frame count of your animation(s) and... Voila! You now have a rendered movie of your animation. You can then use the .avi file if your engine/framework supports it or convert it to some other file type. I converted mine to a .mp4 and a .3gp in order to test out the Android Media Player with different file types.

I followed a tutorial on this process at this link. Everything I described above can be seen in that video.