Creating a MoGraph Sports Intro Animatic: Building Shot Five

Photo of Raymond Olsen

Instructor Raymond Olsen

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  • Duration: 15:20
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  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 18 and greater

In this video, we’ll take shot two and use it as the base for shot five as we build out the majority of the final scene.

In this video, we’ll start with a copy of shot two and construct most of the final scene. The conveyor belt and plays will now be made, and then the trench group will be duplicated, trimmed and repositioned. Next, a new camera angle matching the storyboard is framed up as we pull in the light bank as an xref object to populate a radial cloner. Lastly, we’ll rough out the cityscape background with a cloner and cube.

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Transcript

In this video, we'll add the conveyor belt and plays to our leg assembly. Then, we'll make the city skyline and light bank rig to start finishing out the final scene. Open up your latest version of shot_02_3d. Let's go ahead and save it back out as shot_05_3d_v1. I'm going to start out just by getting rid of the camera rig. I'm going to make a new perspective view to work in. I'm gonna go to hidden line and wire frame view. We're going to make the conveyer belt and plays that lay on top of these roller, and we're going to use a spline wrap to do that. But before we start, I know that we're going to need 60 instances in this cloner to give us enough depth to fly through and then around like we need. So, go ahead and crank the conveyer leg assembly cloner up to 60, and then turn on render instances for that. Let's go ahead and create the spline now. We'll just use a rectangle. Place it over your cloner assembly, and then just crank the width up on that. Something like that. Turn on rounding. Boost that a little bit to give us a nice curve as the conveyer belt bends up and around. Now, press C to make that editable. Rename it converyor_spline. Now, when I press open spline, you can see that the spline is opening up on the right side, and I actually want it to open up on the left side. To do that, we need to set one of these points as the first vertex. So, let's go ahead and close the spline. Go to mesh, spline, set first point. And now the spline opens up here, since this is point zero. So, I'm going to go ahead and get rid of these two verts here, and now we have the conveyor spline that we can wrap out belt and plays around. Let's go ahead and create the belt. I'm just going to use a box. Place it up here. When we spline wrap it, I want to keep the length to keep our plays from getting warped too much, so we want to make this box about twice as wide as it is now. We'll say 16,000, and that way, when we wrap it along the spline and keep the length, it will be long enough. Let's go ahead and crank that up to 150 in Z. I need to go to my wire frame view to see that. We'll give it a height of 10. That will sit here on top of the rollers. Now, let's create the plays that are going to go on top of the belt. I'm just going to use a disc. I'll pull that up so we can see it. We're going to go all the way down to six for rotation segments, one for cap. This just gives us a shape that is not a plane. Then, we'll also use a plane and scale that down to about the same size as the disc. Drop my width and height segments to one to keep the polys low. Then, I'm going to create a cloner. I'm going to make the plane and the disc children of that cloner. I'm going to go ahead and pull the cloner up so we can see it. We want to make this a grid array cloner. Then, drop the count to one in Y. Let's go ahead and make that 16,000 in Z, like we did our conveyor belt. Our conveyor belt is about here in the Z plane, so we'll go ahead and put the cloner there as well. We're going to zoom in. I need to scale down our disc and plane. About there looks good. Now, let's crank up our counts to give us plenty of plays, and let's rename this belt_plays_cloner. Add a random. I want to keep these on the conveyor belt, so I'm going to drop the Y value to one on that. Our plays are going over the edge of the belt, so. Well, actually, our belt just needs to be wider, so grab the belt, pull it out to the edge of the rollers. Now, we can actually make our cloner a little bit bigger, too. There we go, there. Let's rename our belt. Now, these plays are just going to show something on the belt. In the final, they'll be statistics and head shots and what not from the show. But for now, we just need something on there so you can see it passing by. Now, let's go ahead and make this a spline wrap. I'm going to select the conveyor belt, group that. I'm going to rename that conveyor_with_plays. Now, I'm going to go to deformer, grab a spline wrap. I'm going to put it in conveyor_with_plays. I'm also going to put the belt plays cloner in there. Now, I'm going to select the spline wrap and drag conveyor spline into the spline. You can see it went pretty crazy. But if we just change our axis to positive Z, that will put it in line. Then, in rotation, if we flip the banking to 90, that will line that up into the proper orientation. Now, in order to move this, you just move the spline. Grab that spline and move that into place. That's looking pretty good. Let's just go ahead and pull that cloner a little closer to the belt so they're not floating quite so much. Then, pull the conveyor spline down to the belt again. Now, I'm going to make a fresh null. That's at the origin. Then, I'm just going to place everything in that null. I'm going to rename it trench_group. Let's go to rename that random, belt_plays_random. We know we need two of these, so I'm going to go ahead and move this one over about 400 in X. Then, these values, I just know from building the scene, so we're just going to plug them in. Minus 700 in Y and minus 6500 in Z. If I make a cube, you can see that's where the origin is. That's just where we're going to end up, so it'll be something like this. That's where those values came from. I'm just going to leave this cube there for a little bit and call it origin so we can see it. Okay, now I want to duplicate this trench group. I tried using an instance on this, but there was just too much going on with the animation, so that's why I'm using a duplicate. Then, let's just flip that X value with a negative. That gives us an equidistant second conveyor belt. Then, let's lighten up this group a little bit. We don't need any drive shafts over here. We also don't need a trench wall or a trench floor. Now, we're going to create a big floor for the rest of the scene. As you can see, our floor kind of stops here. I'm just going to jump into trench_group. Right here, in the trench_wall_spline, we can pull this floor_boundary out with a Ctrl+drag into the root. What I'm going to do is just extrude that floor boundary, which is basically this shape right here without the trench. That'll give us a cutout that we can use to Boolean out a big plane that we make the floor out of. Let's go ahead and just extrude that. Drop the caps to just caps, and then the object, let's give it 500. I'm just going to bring it down. Now, let's make a plane and just scale that way up. In fact, just plug in 30,000 and 30,000. That'll give us a nice, big plane. I'm going to make this a child of the floor boundary for just a second and zero out the Y. Then, I'm going to pull it back out of that. Then, I'm going to Alt+click a Boolean with the floor boundary selected. Then, I'm going to pull the plane into that Boolean. Defaults to A subtract B, so the plane needs to be first. It doesn't look like we are lined up with the floor, like I had hoped. Just jump in here, grab that Boolean, and slide it up. It looks like that should have been minus 700. We need to pull our floor boundary extrude down just a little. It wasn't intersecting. Now, you can see our trench is showing through and we also have a floor that encompasses the entire scene. Let's rename this main_floor. I'm going to grab the origin, just use that to frame back up to around where the story board is. Let's go ahead and line up your camera to something like that. Create a new camera. I'm going to call this one. Then, the object, let's use a 15 millimeter super wide. Make sure we're using that camera. We were using the default camera over here. Frame up one more time and then repo. Now, with the wider angle, we get a little bit more perspective distortion, which makes it a little bit more of an aggressive look. Just line that up. Now, let's go ahead and add the lights back here. I'm going to drop this into hidden line as well. To make the light ring let's go to create XRef, Add XRef. Then, let's grab our light_bank_low_res. We're going to use the origin to frame up again. You can see, there's our light bank. Let's grab the light_bank_low_res, Alt+click on low graph cloner. We're going to use a radio cloner. We need it in X to Z. Then, when you push the radius up, you can see that that is the correct radius, or plane. But we need to turn the cloner in the transform tab 90 degrees in H. We need even more radius, to about 3200, I believe, is what we need. Right now, we have a full circle, and we only need a little semicircle back there. Grab your cloner. You can use the start and end angles to tighten this up. Something like that will give us a nice, little arc of lights back there. Rename this light_bank_cloner. Okay, there's our light bank. Starting to look like the story board. Let's just add the city. To do that, I'm going to use a cube. Let's crank the Y size up to 600, just to give it a more building-like shape to start with. Then Alt+click on MoGraph cloner. Grab the cloner. Go ahead and just push him back 20,000 in Z, because we want some nice parallax, and as the camera moves, that'll give us that distance. We also need this to be a grid array cloner, and you can just start pushing out your values. Let's push that out to about 12,000, and do about 60 and 10. That'll give us plenty of buildings. We only want one count in Y. Now, let's go ahead and add a random to that. I'm going to leave the position alone, but I'm going to add some scale. I found that five in the X and the Z gives me a good enough difference in building widths. If you crank the Y up to 30, it really gives you that skyscraper look. Let's just rename the cloner city. It looks like we could use a little bit more width. Something like that, to fill the back of the screen. Then, I'm going to drop this down in the Y just a little bit, so it doesn't fill so much of the background. Let's go ahead and rename this city_random, just to keep it clean. We can go ahead and get rid of this origin now. About the only thing we're missing is the logo element that goes right here, where the placeholder we just had was. Let's go ahead and build that in the next video.
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