The first animation step was to key the basic swimming motion of the shark and make it move along a path. This shot, rendered from a new camera object, shows the shark in mid-swim with its back arched. It was amazing how such a simple motion could become so hard to show convincingly. I spent hours tweaking the tail movement and body rotation- trying to get them not too overdone so as to make the shark 'thrash' in the water and not to subtle so as to have it seeming weak. In the end, I found the best solution was to have it move like a snake so that the curve of motion would flow through only one distinct line (like a sine wave) as it moved forward. The head also needed to be given some subtle secondary motion to make the animation believeable, I think in the end having it sway very slightly a few frames ahead of the rest of the body was perfect.



Swimming in a straight line seemed boring, so I thought it might be a little more interesting to have the shark look at the camera and snap a little before it moved on. I felt that to do this would require it to reposition its weight slightly so I first made some small tweaks to the orientation of its lefthand fin to give the impression it was using it to slow down that side of its body and hence turn slightly to the camera.



I then proceeded to animate the jaw opening and closing briefly as if musing.



I then decided to properly light the scene for once, and though the screenshot isn't that clear, you can see I am using a traditional 3-light setup. The kick light was set behind and slightly to the right of camera to bring out most of the detail on the shark. It was coloured a watery blue to give the impression of an underwater scene. I added a fill light of lesser intensity on the other side of the camera and on a more flat angle to bring out the front faces of the shark which otherwise would have remained completely shadowed. This one I coloured green to again add to the watery effect. Finally, I added a bright white kick light illuminating the rear surfaces of the scene to give a subtle glow around the shark's edges.



I then ran a quick test render to check my light setup. It was not too bad, but the front faces of the shark were darker than should have been and a lot of the model remained in shadow.



I moved the key and fill lights down so they were not looking down on the scene so much and would illuminate the bottom of the model a little more. I also added a reddish glow emanating from the shark's eye to brighten the scene a little. The resultant test render:



And so finally, I was ready to render my day's work. I did a batch render, had some coffee and came back. Here it is in economical WMV format of 90KB. Yay WMV's!



I think this turned out rather well for a (reasonably) quick exercise. My only problem with the animation is that when you really look for it, the movement of the small fin seems rather jerky. However, it *IS* a robot.