Scene 1 - Gun

For this scene I created a bullet using a picture from the internet and opened illustrator, from here I drew round half of the bullet and saved as an illustrator 3 file. This file was then imported into 3ds Max, from here I moved the pivot point to the middle of the drawing and then used the lathe modifier and made to go in the x-axis. I then applied materials using the mental ray materials. I then merged this file with my gun file.


From here I created a motion path using a circle. To do this I created a circle using the splines drawing tool. Next I created a target camera and attached it to the circle by creating a motion path. To do this I clicked on the camera and went to animation-constraints-path constraints, and linked it to the circle.



This attached the camera to the circle path, here I had to rotate the camera so that it was following the path and looking at the gun. To do this I had to make sure that the camera was set to follow on the parameters section.


This when looking through the camera view shows the gun rotating in the x-axis direction, but what is really happening is the camera is orbiting around the gun. Next I created the path for which the camera would follow when the gun fires the bullet. For this I went to the spline panel and created a line on frame 100 where the camera was already located. Like before whilst on the line I went to animation-constraints-path constraints and attached the line to the camera. I altered the settings and the camera would follow along the x-axis level with the bullet when it is fired. I also had to make sure that the circle path was deleted between frames 100-250 so the camera went in a straight line and not a semi-circle off the line and back onto it.



Next I cloned the line I just drew so that the bullet could follow this. I made sure the same settings were set on both the camera and bullet paths, and timings were the same using autokey, and settings panel for path constraints.


Lastly, I edited my trigger by rotating and moving accordingly whilst in autokey. It is hard to see as it is a very short clip. When rendering the video I rendered the first 100 frames then the second 150 afterwards, giving me two animations. These are displayed below: