Using Maya, we are animating a spaceship landing. This is the spaceship that I modelled in Maya:
These are the sketches I made to plan the key stages of my animation:
To start, I blocked the key poses of the animation into the timeline – the primary actions. This included the starting point, to above the location that the ship would land, to the spaceship’s final position.
After that, I implemented secondary actions to make the ships movements seem more naturalistic. For instance, I used the rotation tool to make the ship fly in at an angle and hover over the landing spot before descending into its final position. This makes the animation a lot more believable as these secondary apply the laws of physics to the object. Above is a playblast of the animation.
We will be having the ship animated within a city scene. To import the ship into the other scene, go to Windows > General Editors > Content Browser. This will open a dialogue box. Go to the projects tab and find where the spaceship scene is saved and double-click the file once – this will import the spaceship.
Here are a few references for how spaceships might move:
Jasmine Cooper 