Creating a MoGraph Sports Intro Animatic: Animating Shot Two With Time Effector and Camera Morph Tag

Photo of Raymond Olsen

Instructor Raymond Olsen

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  • Duration: 13:11
  • Views: 1767
  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 18 and greater

In this video we’ll animate the driveshaft spinning up using a time effector and give it two extra driveshafts to spin with.

In this video we’ll be dropping the driveshaft into a fracture object and then use a time effector with an animated strength parameter to spin it up with a small wind-up at the beginning. Then we’ll duplicate the driveshaft twice and invert the effector strength to spin the new driveshafts in the opposite direction. We’ll finish by repeating the camera morph procedure, adding some SSAO and rendering out another preview.

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Transcript

In this video, we'll spin up the driveshaft using a time affecter as we creep forward with another camera move, using the morph tag. We'll also add two more driveshafts spinning the opposite direction by using a negative strength with time affecter. So, let's jump right in and start with shot 2 3D v1. So, here's our scene from last time, and we want to set our frame range to 120 to give us 4 seconds of animation on this one. And then we're going to select the driveshaft master, and we're going to make it a child of a fracture object by using alt+command. So, just go to Mograph+fracture while holding alt, and that will drop it under the fracture. So, go ahead and rename this to driveshaft_master_fracture, and let's just add a time affecter. Let's go to Mograph, affecter, time, and instantly you can see it's rotating, but it's rotating in the wrong direction. So I'm just going to drop this rotation to zero on H, and go ahead and drop 90 in B. And if you play that, you can see we've got a rotating driveshaft with no keyframes. So, what I want to do now, is open up our timeline with shift+f3, drag the time affecter in, and we're going to plot a curve for the strength in the time affecter from 0 to 100, and we're going to give it a little bit of an overshoot to kind of give the driveshaft a windup. So, at frame 0, we want the strength to be 0, and then let's say at about 30, we'll take it up to 100. And I'm going to hit tab to get it into the curve mode so we can see our curve. And I'm going to use alt+s to make that soft, so that way we'll just get kind of, like, a linear ramp up to 100. And then on the bottom down here, I'm just going to give it a little bit of an overshoot. So, that's going to make it spin the opposite direction first, and then head into the right direction. So, let's minimize that and just see what it looks like, rewind and hit play. Let's kind of get in there a little bit so we can get a better idea of what this is going to look like, then play again. So, you can see we've got the overshoot, and then it ramps up real fast, so this'll just take a little bit of tweaking. Okay, so, here's how my curve ended up. I went ahead and added another keyframe just to get us past that first little lurch. And then I went ahead and extended my second keyframe all the way to the end and then just ramped that all the way up to 166 to give myself just, like, a nice, smooth ramp all the way up. So, that's good enough for now. You can always come back and tweak it. So now let's jump out, take a look here. I want to add two more driveshafts beneath this and then kind of offset the x-translation a little bit just to give this a little bit more detail. So, I don't want to make an instance, because I want these to spin the opposite way, so I'm going to go ahead and use our control-drag just to drop one down. And then I'm just going to move it over here and kind of, like, line up the gears. And then control-drag again, line up the gears. So, already you can see it's really way more interesting, and as we track the camera over that, I think it's going to be real nice. So, on these two guys, let's grab them both, and in your affecter, just hit minus and the time strength. And now when we press play, they're all animating at the exact same rate, which means the teeth will line up in your gears, and we've done that all with one strength curve. So, as you can see, the trench curves are going to need some love, so, I'll go ahead and adjust those and then place my first camera. So, we just jump right into the trench wall, and here's our spline. We just select our verts. We can maximize that view, go into my live selection, and I'm just going to move whatever I need to move to make our trench juts not intersect with our gears. Okay. So, I think that's good enough for the trench curves for now. Let's go ahead and pull up the storyboard. So, you can see we're over the gears, and the camera is moving forward, so, get rid of that. Let's start a little bit closer up to the front. So, this is a pretty good start for the camera, so I'm just going to go ahead and create a camera. We'll call this "1", and then I'm going to grab the camera, switch to world coordinates with W, so we can just drag it straight up. And then we need to look through it with this little crosshair. So, let's come on up here. I don't want to see the exit, so I'm going to angle my camera down a little, and then continue to move it forward. So, this looks pretty cool right here, all these gears. So, we'll do the same thing we did on the earlier scene. I just duplicated the camera, renamed it "2," and now I'm just going to pull this guy back. So, that's camera 2, so now select camera 1, select camera 2, go up to camera morph. It's populated our camera fields, and look through it with the crosshair. And once again, we can just animate a blend curve, so, we'll start at 0 all the way to 100. Jump into your timeline, shift+f3, hold in your morph tag, hit tab. You get to curve, and go ahead and hit L to get that to be linear. Then rewind, and shift+F, and just hit play. So, that was pretty quick, and we did all this with two curves. So, now you can see it gets a little boring right here, and we might be out of this shot by now. But what you can do is kind of grab some more gears and then just adjust maybe the bottom driveshafts, you know, just kind of play around a little bit to give it a little bit more variety so they're not all three the exact same. So, I'll go ahead and to that real quick, and then we'll finish this one up. And I'm going to go ahead and hide conveyor_leg_assembly_cloner, just because he's so busy. And then I'll just come into the driveshaft one and two which are the lower ones, and I'll just play around with those a little. And I'll fast forward while I do that. Okay, so, that's good. I've got a little bit of variety. I just kind of spread the gears out through the camera move, and for an animatic, I think this is acceptable. In my head, I'm thinking we'll add chains and everything that go into the wall later, but this should give you a pretty good idea of how the shot's going to feel for your animatic. And I did want to mention, we kind of got a little sloppy in our gears, and I'm pretty good about naming stuff. But this right here, how you can see it's just instance one, two, three. It was really hard for me to figure out which gear that was. So, if I'd been a little bit more attentive, I would've put these in an order that was named properly, to where it'd be really easy to come in here and grab these. So, I would definitely recommend keeping track of all your naming. And we're not really seeing the windup as much as I'd like, so I'm going to jump back into the curve editor, and then here's my windup keyframe. So, I'm just going to drop it a little bit more and extend it out a little bit just to accentuate that a little bit. There we go. That feels a little bit better to me. So, we'll close out of that, turn our conveyor legs back on, play it a couple more times. You can see we got cameras showing. I'm going to turn those off, and this little crosshair here is our time affecter, so I'm just going to use the stoplights here. If you alt+double-click that, that will turn visible editor and renderer off. So now, without the cameras and the time affecter, we get just a little bit cleaner. That's the world axis right there, so let's get rid of that. So, now that we've got the world axis and some of that other stuff out of the way, I'm going to turn off the grid too. Watch it just a couple more times to make sure it looks good, and now we are going to jump into grout shading, NA. And, if you're in R-18, you can actually add screen space AO, and you'll see this gives us a little bit of ambient occlusion which kind of just adds to the depth of the scene. And, just like that, it looks, you know, a little bit better. And for now, I'm going to leave all the colors as they are because I kind of like the contrast you get. So, I think we're just going to leave this here for now, and, again, we can always come back and change colors, or whatever, later. Now that we've got that, go ahead and save your file, and what this does is it locks in that V1 name. So, we save that, so now we've got shot2_3D_v1. Let's double-check our render settings, control-b. Make sure everything still looks great, yep. Our render token is still in there, so I'm going to close that, and now we just hit shift+r to render. Now I save incrementally, and I already had a v2, so mine jumped up to v3, but it really doesn't matter. You could be all the way up to version 18 by now, so don't worry about that, and close your file. And I just want to check my footage previews folder just to double-check everything work properly. Let's watch this guy, and there's our render.
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