Animating and Lighting the L98A2

After completing the modelling and texturing, I moved on to animating the rifle. My plan was to disassemble the rifle, as it would be in the field, and the internal components shown to the camera. First though, I animated the camera to pan past the rifle to show off my model.

I did this by setting a camera assigned to my perspective and lined up my perspective to key frames that I wanted. Next, I animated the gas parts coming out of the hand guard and panned the camera over to them.

Finally, I animated the disassembly of the main body.

All together, I had roughly 40 seconds of animation. Before it could be rendered, I had to set up the lighting of the scene. I used two area lights to make sure the rifle was visible and then added a flashlight to reflect off of some of the edges and cast shadows on the interior.

I tweaked the intensity of the lights by rendering single frames and checking if they looked right. It took me about half an hour to get the lights how I wanted.

The animation was now ready to be rendered.