Helicopter Airship Animation Tutorial

Airship Animation

We've uploaded a new tutorial on animating a helicopter airship in motion. 

The videos are the latest addition to our rapidly expanding Vimeo channel.

In this step-by-step tutorial, we explain how to approach the challenge of animating a helicopter/airship in motion. The airship has a flexible caboose, which must be animated so that it overlaps the main action and settles in a naturalistic and believable way.

The purpose of the tutorial is to learn the principle of flexibility and overlapping action, one of the original 12 Principles of Animation.

Overlapping action
Overlapping Action is really another way of talking about flexibility.  The underlying premise is that in any action, things shouldn't happen at the same time.  The principle is also sometimes known as "successive breaking of joints", an idea developed by legendary Walt Disney animator Art Babbit.

The principle dates back to the 1930s, when the Disney Studios first discovered what would become known as the 12 Principles of Animation.  

Walt Disney
Walt Disney told his animators: "Things don't come to a stop all at once guys; first there's one part and then another".

Consider the example on the right of a drummer, taken from The Animator's Survival Kit (the book every animator should own).

The motion is driven from the chest, shoulder, upper arm, and elbow, unfolding (breaking) through the various joints all the way down to the finger tips.

Successive Breaking of Joints
Not everything happens at the same time. The body parts are flexible, and overlap one another. Or, as Art Babbitt put it, it's about the "successive breaking of joints". Mastering the Successive Breaking of Joints adds flexibility and believability to your animation. It also honours the basic laws of physics. Like everything in animation, we can break the rules, but we must learn to master them first.

Airship Thumbnails
In the case of the airship, the top part of the machine will come to halt sooner than the caboose below, which is flexible, and so will "overlap" the main action.

Airship Animation: Thumbnails 

Examples
In the animation below, Escapee Maria Robertson shows how it's done, combining the airship exercise with some animation of a fox (or, rather, two foxes) with a flexible tail.

Airship Rig Notes

Airship by Kiel Figgins

You can find Kiel Figgins' excellent airship rig here. It's a great rig for learning the principles of drag, follow-through and overlapping action - a crucial part of the animator's skill set.

Animation Buffet
You can download the airship here at Animation Buffet (an excellent site for free rigs); it forms part of Figgins's "Rig Set Five".

About the Airship Rig
The main rotor at the top powers the animation, but the pod underneath drags, follows-through and overlaps the main action. The trick is to bring the airship to a stop, and have the pod overshoot and settle.

Opening the rig
When you first open Maya, you will need to import the rig into your shot, rather than opening it as a scene file.

Turn on Locators
One thing you will have to do is turn on Locators in your viewport, since the direction control that allows you to "point" the pod is a locator - which acts like a pole vector.  Move the locator around and the pod will point in the direction you want.

Pod rotation
The pod will translate in X Y and Z but it won't rotate from side the side. To change this, select the AirshipKF:Armcirc control (the one that controls the pod) and open up the Attribute Editor. Select the AirshipKF:Armcirc tab and open up Limit Information. Find the rotates tab and uncheck all the rotation limits. You can now rotate the pod using AirshipKF:Armcirc control.

Toprotation
There is a slider called Toprotation in the Channel Box in the main rotor control that allows you to adjust the speed of the rotors. Try a very high setting, such as 1,000, to get a really nice, fast spin.

Also set Set Lowspin to around 300 to get a slower counter rotation from the lower blades.

Scale
The Airship does not have a scale control as such. If you need to scale the Airship up or down, select it in the Outliner, press Cntrl A to open the Attribute Editor, find the Transform Attributes tab, and change the values for Scale to whatever you need instead.

Glowing "eyes"
To produce a glowing effect on the airship's "eyes" above, go ahead and select the "eye" geometry, and right click and assign a new Lambert material. Name it eyeLambert (always name things clearly) and in the special effects tab in the Attribute editor you can give it a glow intensity of 1. This will make the eye glow. You can also create a point light and embed it inside the "eye" - giving the airship a glowing headlight.

Examples of airship animation

Airship chasing a car down a city street by Nick Dimitriadis

Airship title animation by Escapee David Davis

Updated Rig
We also have an updated copy of the Airship rig, which fixes some bugs, which we can send you if you need it. Email me at alex.williams1@pearson.com and I'll send you a copy.

AirWolf Animation by David Davis

Ultimate Pendulum
You can also check out the very useful "Ultimate Pendulum" which does pretty much the same kind of thing as the Airship; and is also very useful for learning drag and follow-through.

Vimeo Channel
You can find the Airship Tutorial at our password-protected Vimeo Tutorial Channel here. The videos are available for all our current students and Escapees.

The Escape Studios Animation Blog is a personal view on the art of animation and visual effects. To apply for our BA/MArt in 3D Animation, follow this link.  To apply for our storyboarding evening class, visit this page here.  For the next 12 week animation course, click here. And to apply for the next evening class in Producing Animation, see this page.