Animating the bar scene

The first Thing I had to do for the bar scene was to import the gun, bullet and shell into my bar scene (I clicked on import and then merge).

I positioned the gun at one end of the room, in line with the cocktail glass on the table.

I then set about setting up the time line. I wanted to have 30 frames per second, and wanted the scene to last 30 seconds, as i wanted to give the effect of the gun firing in slow motion. This meant that I needed 900 frames in the time line.

After positioning the bullet and the shell inside the gun I selected the bullet and pressed the auto key button. I then moved the time line to the 900th frame and dragged the bullet to the end of the scene, just past the cocktail glass. This created the movement of the bullet. While the bullet was still selected I used the track view of the curve editor change the tangents to liner. This made the bullet travel at a constant speed. I used auto key to put a spin on the pellet, with the rotate button.

I used the same technique to animate the trigger; I had to change the hierarchy of the pivot point to make the trigger pivot in the right place. I selected the top slider of the gun and used auto key again to create the sliding back motion of when a gun is fired. By selecting the item that I had animated and then sliding its key frames along the time line I could alter the timing of each animation.

To make the shell eject out of the gun I used key frame and the move tool. I also rotated the shell to give the impression that it was fired out, again I purposefully made this slow as the shot was meant to look like it was in slow motion.

To make the smoke that fired out of the gun barrel and shell I used the super spray particle system. This creates a stream of objects that you can modify. I selected a particle size of 5.3, a speed of 1.122 and a changed the timing so the particles started on the 50th frame and finished on the 200th.

I applied a particle material to the system, to make a smoke like colour. I set the glossiness to zero and applied an opacity map to the material to alter its transparency.

After the animating had been done, I set up ten different cameras. I positioned each camera so that it could film a specific shot of the bullet travelling through the air. I then labelled each camera with regard to what frames I wanted it to capture. This meant that when it came to rendering the shots I only render the specific frames I needed, saving time.

One of the cameras I positioned facing the barrel, so that I could capture the bullet flying towards the screen. I rendered each set of frames for each camera at 720 *1280 on low settings. I rendered the last two scenes with the close up of the glass breaking at higher settings to get more detail.