Week 9

          
This week I made main animation loop for the character:
          

              
As well as loops for other civilians running through the town. These were all pretty easy to make as I already had the rig I used for the rider, and I won't bother making new ones for women or children. I started with a normal run loop:
                      

             
Then a guy holding a box
             

                 
Then a sequence for someone falling:
                 

             
Many shots have pieces of debris shooting through the sky overhead. To make these I started by drawing a flame curl on a curved plane, then copied it to form a loop:
                         

             
I then copied and rotated these loops, stretching as I went, and ended up with this:
                          

         
I then rounded off the front and added textures to each part (starting bright and red, gradually getting more translucent and darker as I went along). This is the final result:
                        

                 
This isn't really relevant, but I liked the view from below:
                           

                   
I also made several layers of fog to be used in the main animation, which move at different speeds to gradually obscure the different mountains as the sequence progresses:
                          

       
I also used particle effects to have it rain ash. The particles in each one are smaller and more transparent the further from the camera the cloud is:
                    

                 
I also made a few nearly transparent circular planes that I've animated to roll across the screen in the foreground to simulate fog (since they're so front and centre I wanted a little more abstraction than basic fog effects, and I felt this style goes better with what I've done for the flaming debris, lava bursts, etc.
                            

                        
For the clouds of smoke coming from the volcano I made a series of tubes, molded them, textured them with some noise and transparency, and set them to slowly grow and rotate out of the volcano. In each shot the eruption is further along, so I made three iterations:
                           

                           
Here's how the scene turned out for the first shot:
                        

                     
And here it is later on:
                            

                      
I also made a full Roman style ship model and animated the oars for one of the final shots: