I decided to model and animate the planets surface to add to the animation and add to the storyline of the robot landing and starting the invasion, I wanted to keep it a little more basic than my other models as I was fast running out of time but I also wanted it to look part of the animation and be very good visually so I already had a plan on what I wanted it to look like as a finished piece.
First off I made just a plane but added a large number of divisions so I could get a varied look to the surface when I edited it with a soft deformer, I wanted smooth hills and craters and the larger the divisions the better it will turn out and the smoother it will look while the ground would have more variety like an actual rocky surface.
I kept it quite simple and just made some hills and craters and added a directional light to add shadows so the craters and mountains would look like they actually belonged and the light would affect the other 3D models in the scene also.
I wanted the planets surface to look like the cel shaded planet in the previous scene so I used toon outlines and cel shaders with the same kind of colors and added a granite/rock texture as a bump map and edited the properties till i got the feel i wanted, I wanted it to look desolate perhaps like a nuclear blast had affected the area. Or a moody atmospheric alien world.
I wanted to add a sky also I wanted it to look like a clear sky but with a red atmosphere like in the previous scene, so I made two spheres one red but with a lot of transparency then added a space background file I had made previously on the outside sphere to give it a galactic atmosphere to the planet. I felt this fit the previous planet animation nicely and gave a very nice effect to the scene.
I added a 3D model of a skull I had modelled previously and rendered it with toon shaders, in the animation scene the robot lands and steps on the skull and forces it into the ground to add atmosphere and a story to the planet. I had to animate and batch render the planets surface separately as the robot model wouldn't fit into the scene and I didn't have enough time to figure out why. But I felt that as a finished product the planet looked very nice and had an original kind of visual look to it.
To put the robot in I calculated how many frames I wanted for each animation and added a green background to the robot part so I could key that colour out in the final animation scene. I worked out how many frames I needed for each scene to correlate with each other and I ended up very happy with the resulting final effect of the scene.
I did the green screen keylight effect in after effects I decided I wanted the robot to land then the camera to go up showing off the entire model before panning out for a full view
Unfortunately something went wrong keying it out and I wasn't too sure what, ended up that a black border appeared so I masked it out with opacity masks set to subtract
I also had to move animate the position and scale to make it fit just perfect, in the end I was very happy with how the scene went, and felt it was really fortunate I had looked into how to virtually green screen objects into animation in after effects previously as it allowed the animation to actually happen.
