wtf? – This animation was a personal project that I worked on sporadically for about year whenever I had some free time. I was working a lot and sometimes it was a challenge to put aside time for my own work.
The entire piece is a particle animation created using Maya and After Effects. All objects enter the screen as particles, coalesce to form an object, and then break apart. The main "shattering" effect was created in After Effects which surprised me because Maya is such a powerful program. In order to create the effect of the particles entering the screen and forming an object, I had to animate them backwards - breaking the object and using gravity to pull them in the direction that I wanted - then when played in reverse, the particles would form the object. For an animated object like the helicopter, I had to reverse the footage before animating, so it wouldn't be moving backwards when I reversed the footage again.
The military vehicles are free/public domain models of various file formats available online. I imported them into Maya and applied textures, lighting etc. Also some reverse engineering for aesthetic reasons and to clean up some of the geometry that didn't import correctly.
I really wanted to build them myself, but had the opportunity to screen the piece in the Animation Block Party (www.animationblockparty.com) and would have never made the deadline. The World Trade Center towers are primitives (stretch cubes) - the challenging part was making the texture maps. Surprisingly, it was very hard to find a photo I could use to make them, so I used several and pieced them together in photoshop.The stars, planets rings, and galaxy were all created and animated in Maya. The texture maps for the planets were animated using the "Turbulent Displacement" distortion filter in After Effects. |
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