Simple Animation

For this project, I had to create a simple animation. I chose to animate the scene from the Digital Cinematography exercise. All of the details for the creation of this scene, including information about shaders and lighting, are described in that project. All of these details were kept the same for this project, so I will just focus on the details related to how I animated the scene. This project also helped serve as a framework for my final project.

A Playblast of the animated Earth scene. The motion path for the Moon is clearly visible in this Playblast.

The Earth was animated using keyframe animation. The Rotate Y attribute of the Earth is keyed on the first and last frames. It changes from 0 to 1440 meaning that the Earth rotates 4 times. The Moon is animated using a motion path. The Moon is attached to the motion path (as seen in the Playblast above) and the motion path's U Value is keyed on the first and last frames. As the U Value changes from 0 to 1 the Moon rotates around the motion path. Just like with the last project, I was trying to experiment with the features in Maya rather than create a realistic depiction of how the Earth and the Moon rotate in space. Also, in the graph editor I set all of the tangents to linear because the animation was not looping properly at first. The animation has 120 frames. A video of the final animation can be seen below. For some reason the Earth does not rotate in the final animation. It is supposed to rotate the same way it does in the Playblast but it does not. I do not know what is causing this issue. I tried re-rendering the video, but this did not fix the issue.

A rendered video of the final animated Earth scene.