Animating an ariel dog fight.

To start off I want to say that I hate clouds, creating a realistic cloud in 3Ds Max is time consuming, and the tutorials on it just didn't help me at all. So in the end I had to add clouds by using thousands of gizmos with volume fog, this made something that looks cloud like but not like a real cloud. It looks better then it did with the image I placed as a background in the environments section of render setup. Once I had the 'cloudscape' set up as a scene set. I was able to import in the models of the flying planes, not the ones with the wheels and started to animate a dog fight.

There is only one thing I can say about how the animated scene I did turned out like in my option, utter rubbish. While the cloud looks better then I had originally feared and go very well with the background, the camera placement and the action are rushed. Which is because the whole scene was rushed after I spend most of the time trying to get the clouds to look like clouds and work as I wanted. This left me to rush thought the actual scene and not as I had originally planed do a separate in depth storyboard of the whole fight scene.

It shows that the final aerial fight was thrown together and that I wasn't able to clearly plan out what I wanted to happen when. If I could do it again I would start earlier on the whole thing and given up on realistic cloud and go with the gizmos sooner. Another thing I would do is go over the main storyboard and sort out who would be doing which scene of the animation earlier on as there was some confusion I felt as to who was doing what bit within the group. Which led to some scenes being rushed.

The final Problem I had was with the rendering, it took a real age and to cut back the time I was forced to shorten  all of the sections of the scene so that it would render. This means that some of the bits to my scene are over very quickly and are to me obversely cut.

So in all I don't like the way my scene went at all, and the only redeeming feature is the quality of the image looks.