The Fate of the Earth

By: Andrew Kotska

About this Animation:

This animation was thought of one night while watching Star Wars. At first i thought this was going to be challenging to do when i started to create the Death Star, since i had no knowledge at all in any 3D software. After reading parts of the 3d Studio Max Bible, i realized that this was not as difficult as expected.

Rendering Computer Specs and Programs Used:

Athlon64 3700+
2GB Dual Channel DDR
ATI Radeon x850 XT
320GB SATA HD
Windows XP
3D Studio Max
Bryce 5.5
Acid Pro 6.0

The Death Star:

This was modelled in 3D Studio Max. It took a little while to figure out how to create it, but after a few hours i realized that the 'laser shooting thing' could easily be created from 2 circles on top of each other and then create a surface between them. Then create another suface to connect the whole thing to a sphere. The trough around the death star was made by indenting the sphere around the Death Star.  I used a built in rock texture for the Death Star, which was as close of a texture that i could find that looked good. While rendering the Death Star in Bryce, i smoothed the surface so the polygons would not show as much. It did make it look a lot better, but it really slowed down the rendering time. To render just the camera going around the Death Star took approximately 4 hours just for a 5 sec clip.

The Laser Beam, was basically made from cylinders and and a sphere with a green metallic texture. I made the cylinders and had them stored inside of the Death Star, and as it was preparing the laser to fire, I made a path for the cylinders to come out. When they met up at a point, i made a sphere appear, and then grow. Then another cylinder came out of the sphere, to make the appearence that it was firing towards the earth.

The Earth:

The earth was done in bryce, and is a sphere with an earth texture that was built into bryce. This texture is pretty amazing. It is a full render of the earth, but I was planning on adding a cloud texture around it, but when I did it, it never looked that good.

When the earth gets blown up by the death star, I made the texture on the earth morph from the earth texture to a molten core texture.

Audio:

For the audio in this, I took the Imperial March from Star Wars. At the point where the death star blows up the earth, i added a generic sound of something blowing up, that i think really suits the earth being blown up.

Final Thoughts:

While creating this animation, I came to realize that I would hate to be working in the animation industry waiting hours for just a clip to render and then realize that something is just off by a little bit and need to change it. I am glad that I decided to do this instead of an essay since this gave me more of a hands on approach to the topics that were brought up in class.