It's Model Time

This post is going to be commenting on the three models that I created and what they are doing within the animation that I have created.

Firstly I will comment on the Giant Crossbow Model. For this model I followed the storyboard that I had created and wanted to show off the destructive power of the crossbow. This was achieved by having the crossbow take a shot and destroy the catapult model, there was not a lot of animation that needed to be done to the crossbow however the animation that needed to be done was still very fiddly. However I am still pleased with how the crossbow animation has turned out.

The animation that I used on the crossbow was to make the arrow fire from the crossbow. I could have just made the arrow fire, but I thought that was too easy and very boring, so I decided to animate the turning wheel and the rope that are attached to the crossbow (this was the fiddly part). I kept moving the turning wheel in a rotation motion so that it looked realistic, also I timed it so that the rope moved forward, with finally the arrow shooting off from the crossbow once the roped had moved forward enough. I will screenshot what I have animated on the crossbow so that it makes more sense.

This screenshot shows the crossbow, you can see the turning wheel and the rope which I have animated to move

Next is the catapult, this model was the most tricky to animate as it has a few moving parts and if I had just left them without any movement, the animation would have been very boring and not very entertaining. Even though the catapult was the most difficult to animate I am still very pleased with how it turned out.


The animation that was needed for the catapult was, the catapult needed to fire at the crossbow and cause some damage. So I needed to animate the handle, the turning wheel, the arm and the ball all in one single movement. With the ball then causing damage on the tower.


The handle, arm, turning wheel and ball all needed to be rotated at the same time on the timeline so that it seemed realistic, and I think it does. Again I will screenshot the catapult so that it is clearer to understand.

This screenshot is of the catapult which you can see the arm has moved from top to bottom, the turning wheel, the handle have been animated to move also

The last model to comment on is the tower, this model was not really animated in anyway. I only had to 'Pro Boolean' out the catapult's ball so that it looked like the ball caused some damage to the tower.


This however did start to become an annoying problem as I found out that when something is 'Pro Booleaned' in an animation, the geometry starts to go wrong further down the animation, which became very annoying. Once I 'Pro Booleaned' out the ball I found it disappeared from the rest of the animation so I needed to clone the ball and time it within the animation with the 'Pro Boolean' which took a very long time.


Furthermore when I started to move the cloned ball into a better position it ended going in the wrong position when the animation was played, however I eventually fixed it and am happy with how it has turned out. Again I will screenshot the tower for better understanding.

This screenshot is of the tower as you can see there is a hole in the tower which is the 'Pro Boolean'