Animation - Part C - Flying Parts

The flying parts of the animation are the most elegant. They look exceptionally difficult and flashy... but were perhaps the easiest section to do. A few sneaky tricks allowed me to have a ton of little pieces and segments effortlessly fly into their exact position... and not a pixel out. So how did I pull this off? Read on

The first thing that the eagle-eyed readers of this blog would have spotted was the fact that the screenshots have translucent wheels in the scene next to SteamBot. On rendering, these wheels are actually completely invisible (Right Click -> Object Properties -> Visibility -> Set to 0). In fact, most of the undercarriage is invisible. I merged the entire undercarriage model with this one, and set its visibility down to 0.

The animaiton of the flying pieces is basically a very clever process (If I do say so myself). The secret is that I simply worked backwards.

You see, having the finished model meant that all the pieces were in the correct place. All that I needed was to have the pieces flying in from far away. So instead of starting with a piece a long way away, and then keyframing it into the scene... I started with the finished model, and keyframed the train part flying AWAY from the scene. Once I had done this, all I had to do was swap the 2 keyframes around (If you haven't tried this, all you have to do is click and drag the keyframes on the timeline to move them). So instead of the animation starting at the centre, and flying out of the scene... the animation now started out of the scene, and flies back to its original starting point in the correct position. Sneaky eh?

The only step to do from this was to stagger all the keyframes and movements to allow the pieces to cascade onto the model. This was merely a simple case of dragging the keyframes around to where they fit best, so that they 'finished' up on the model at different times.

This process was repeated with the entire model. All the wheels, cylinders, axles, extra carriages all flew in from this exact process. Use the original point as the guide, build the keyframes from it: Then swap them around. Repeat until looking awesome