I must say, this has been an enlightening experience for me, at first I really struggled but I feel that come the end I had progressed leaps and bounds. The actual animating itself proved very frustrating, but over time, learning the boundries with what you can/cant achieve made the process much easier.
I also found myelf making alot of work arounds (for example with the lazer beam appearing) which may not be as time effective as a professional still achieved my overall goal.
I would also like to share some of my reflections on techniques I used, firstly lets start with spline paths. These can be fantastic when getting a fluid object such as ship or plane to move, as the banking tool adds to some extra realism, but it is also very restrictive. Once an object is set to the plane, you cant remove part of it (again the lazer) mid flow. It is also true that you cant animate starting part the way along the path.
The graph editor i felt was a fantastic tool. Rather than keyframing the out of control Xwing by doing a series of rotations, in the graph editor I was actually able to set it to go over 360 degree spins, which is how I got the ship to tumble over itself. I actually had the ship rotate to 800 degrees over the period of 10 frames, allowing for over 2 full rotations. This allowed for a really dynamic, out of control look that I was really pleased with.
Overall I feel I grasped this assignemnt well. I did feel my lighting techniques and texturing could be better, but the Modelling and Aninmation I am pleased with (I fell these aspects will be of most use to me as a games designer) But now I will start to turn my attention to the finer details, such as shading maps and adding shine to polygons.
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