Boat Animation

opening from Hayley Allen on Vimeo.

The following images show the beginning opening where I animated the water and boat drawing close to the castle. This was our establishing shot so I wanted to spend quite a bit of time making the water look impressive. The first image shows how the scene looked in Maya without the actual castle and the flag I added later. I made the transparency of the wtare quite low and gave it an ocean shader to make it look like water and also added a plane below with a noise shader of green and yellow to create the idea of something below, giving the scene more depth than just one softbody plane of the water.


The same scene in wireframe:


The following picture shows how Maya conveyed my water effect if you jump far up the timeline. This made it hard to see whether the water was working properly and it did come down to the final render most of the time. From my previous practice I knew it would look ok in the end though.

The next two are from Lydia's section where it enters the castle dock. Although the scene has no textures, you can see where we used the boat weight on Maya to create ripples in the water as the boat passes through.

We aslo played around with lighting, ending up adding a light within the lamp on the boat as well as one on top of the boat just above it to light the room effectively. It also created a nice shadow of the lamp on the water. I parented these to the boat, yet keyframed the boat weight seperately as Maya didn't want it to work otherwise.