Using Maya to Create a Spaceship Launch Scene

Here, you will see the basic design and process I went through to create a short spaceship launch scene in Autodesk's animation program, Maya. The general idea was that I wanted the spacecraft to be on an island in the middle of an ocean. At the start, a boat would pass by and then the rocket would take off. In the process of taking off, the shuttle would drop its boosters. Once it got to space, part of the rocket would "open" and something remotely resembling a person would come out and wave. The idea seemed simple to start, but it turned out to be quite a time consuming (yet oddly satisfying and fun) project. Also, before I start, I want to attribute Freepik for the skull and crossbones as well as the space and ocean environment. I would also like to credit hdri-skies.com for the sky environment and their use of the CCO license. Now, on to the real project.

To complete this project, I only needed Autodesk's Maya installed on a semi-decent computer (my M1 MacBook Air) as well as a good mouse. Maya has built-in interactive tutorials that helped me learn the basics and I have used YouTube videos along with many Google searches to get where I am now. There is also a 700 page guide from Autodesk I found helpful in some areas, though the one I found with Google searches was a little outdated.

First, I created a new project and got out some basic components including two cylinders and a sphere. By scaling the top faces of one of the cylinders down, I created a cone shape without a top. With this shape, I was able to size a sphere to perfectly make the rounded tip of a spacecraft. I then put all of the components together to make the general shape and added two more cylinders to the bottom to make the proper look by using the same scaling method. I finally highlighted all of the components and pressed combine to help with the next steps.

On a real rocket, there is usually more than one booster. Looking at a clipart version I found on the internet and want to model after, there are two smaller ones and one large one. To make the large booster, I duplicated the smaller one by holding shift while using the move tool. Since the bottom components were not necessary, I first separated the items in the duplicated object. I then took the booster and removed the unnecessary components and re-combined everything. Since the bottom of the booster did not look pretty, I used the bevel tool while selecting the bottom face to create a more rounded body. I then played with the settings to find a sweet spot. Before combining the boosters, there needed to be a second small booster. I could have created one by just duplicating the booster like I just did for the large one, but there is a better way to help with coloring later on called instancing. This method links the two components together so a texture applied to one item is applied to the other. In the duplicate menu, I changed the settings from copy to instance, then hit duplicate special. This created the instance needed for me to then align the items and add some struts connecting the boosters. Lastly, I parented all of the items together for ease of use when animating.

With the boosters all set, it was time to make the actual space shuttle. I started by making a base that includes the wings. It would be what I would later build the actual structure of the ship on. First, I made a cube and used the scale function to flatten it out and make it long like in the above pictures. Then, using the edge loop tool found in the Mesh Tools menu, I created rough lines of where the wings would stick out. At this point I turned off symmetry and used the extrude tool to create protrusions for the wings.

Now that I had something to work with, I needed to add wings. To start, I flattened the object to make my life easy. I then moved into vertex mode and found the point on the very front/top and turned on soft selection. I made my affected range as large as possible without touching the original shape to ensure that it would keep its structure. Next, I dragged the point all the way to the original cube and then dragged the other vertices to make the wing shape. I also pulled out a bit of the area in the back to make it so that the wing was not completely straight. Once I finished, there was some of the wing still sticking out where I had dragged it all the way in so I removed it by pressing B to turn soft selection off and then manually moved the vertices to the correct position. Finally I scaled the ship up to have a height and found that there was a portion of overlapping faces. This was easily fixed using to merge tool at which point I was ready to give it structure.

To finish off the shuttle, I needed to give it structure. I started by just taking a copy of the booster and cutting it in half by deleting half of the faces. I filled in the hole with mesh tools and then placed it on the base while flattening it a little bit to create a more oval shape. Using edge mode I was able to move the vertices over to accommodate the cone structure and also stretch the sphere at the front to make it stick out correctly. Next, I spent a considerable amount of time aligning everything (the align tool has its limits) until it looked like the ship had a good structure. Then I stole the bottom of the boosters I had already created and put two at the bottom, scaling and stretching them with the base to look good. After, I added a box in between and turned my focus to fine tuning. I hopped into vertex mode and started dragging things to make everything look smoother. I added edge loops and soft select when needed and ended with a nice final product that I placed on the boosters.

Since I planned on making the rocket launch on an island, it would only make sense for a boat to go by. I started off by creating a sphere, then stretching it into an oval. I then cut off the top to make a bowl shape that somewhat curved in. From there, I used the extrude tool to pull the shape up a little then hit extrude again and pulled it back down, creating the sides of the boat. With the simple things out of the way, I proceeded to utilize soft select and vertex selection while in symmetry mode to shape the boat into more of a realistic shape. Once I was done with that, I was still unhappy with the result. The vertexes were in weird positions and the structure looked like it was a crushed and unfolded piece of paper. The solution was to use the modeling toolkit's smooth tool, which took out the wrinkles and organized my stray vertices.

To create a flag all I had to do was create a post, flag, and image for the flag. This should have been simple. Just import an SVG right? Well the work in Maya was easy, but I first had to go find a suitable image without copyright, of course. I then found a bunch of different versions in one image on Freepik. From there I had to download and crop it to the clipart I wanted. With that, I then had to use a background remover (remove.bg works great for me, it's owned by Canva) and download that image. Since the skull and cross bones was still not an SVG, the final step was to put it into an SVG converter. After trying around five different websites, I landed on kittl.com, which had a great result and more importantly let me download the product without an account, though it looks like you only get three credits. I know I could have downloaded a pre-made SVG or at least a cropped image with a clear background, but I had my reasons. Almost all available images were overcomplicated, and upon finding a few simplistic ones, I would find out they had strict copyright licenses. Finally, I had a good SVG and I simply imported it into Maya and placed it on a flattened rectangle. After giving the rectangle a pole and a point using another square and a pyramid, I placed and scaled the flag to be large and placed it on the ship.

Although I was not looking for a picture perfect, realistic ship, I still wanted something clearly identifiable as one. When looking around the two most common things I saw across clipart boat were forecastles, sails, and rams. Two of those were new vocabulary words for me (in terms of boats). The forecastle, apparently pronounced folk-soul which is about the opposite of what I would have thought is the raised section in the front of the ship. The ram, unsurprisingly pronounced ram is sharp protrusion sticking up and out the top of the ship. To make the forecastle, I originally was planning to just insert an edge loop on the top and pull the ship up, but I soon realized that I could not do that due to the way I generated the shape. Instead, I used the multi-cut tool to add one line between some of the top vertexes. I then dragged it up and adjusted the other vertices to make it look good. I then moved on to create the ram by simply stretching a cone, placing it, then moving on vertex up to make it blend together. For the sail, I just took prisms and moved one of their side edges to make it a right triangle. I put them on a post and offset them slightly like I saw in many pictures. That was when it occurred to me to put the flag on top of the sails. I decided that it would look good and switched the square flag pole to a round one with a round tip. With that, I had a decent boat and moved on.

Before I went any further, I wanted to create a base for everything. I started by creating the island portion by creating a square plane. I then went into vertex mode and dragged everything around to give it a good shape while also adding some texture. For the ocean, I just made a huge plane and put it just below everything. I also moved the planes to not overlap. To make the launch pad, I simply took a cylinder and squished it. I placed the rocket and boosters on top and added supports under the biggest booster because it was elevated.

To be clear: I am NOT an artist. I wanted to make something recognizable as a human that was easy to rig. And that is what I did. I started by creating a skeleton base, and shrinking it way down. A sphere made a perfect head and I stretched some cylinders. I made a "hand" by taking another sphere and stretching it. The last step was to make a few cubes and stretching them to be the legs and actual body. I also painted the helmet and neck with the skin weights tool to make sure that none of the other movements would mess them up. I ended by putting the arms down to allow it to "fit" within the spacecraft. With that out of the way, I did some cleanup (naming everything, organization) and was ready for animation.

I decided to first give the boat movement and give the rocket some vibration before it lifted off. The first step was to give the boat vertical movement to simulate the "bobbing" in water. I had tried manually doing this and looping it with clips, but I realized the movement would not be especially smooth or line up how I liked. That lead me to create an expression. After looking up lots of documentation, I was able to come up with this expression: FullBoat.translateY = 0.3 + sin(time * 3) * 0.25. The 0.3 at the start sets the boat to the correct height before starting. I could have frozen the axis, but did not want to mess anything up in the process and this was just as easy. The sin(time * 3) part of the expression uses the constantly increasing time variable to create a sine wave. Multiplying it by three speeds the animation up. The 0.25 at the end sets how much movement will happen, or in terms of the expression, the amplitude of the sine wave. This in the end makes a nice up and down motion without sudden pauses. I then just put keyframes on horizontal axis to create the forward motion. To create the vibration, I created a single clip with 10 frames of movement. I then scaled and duplicated them while repeating them as needed to create a basic ramp up effect. I cleaned it up by baking the clip back into normal keyframes.

To start, I added a few flames using cones I had deformed. I placed duplicated versions under all of the boosters and made them super small to hide them (instead of turning visibility off because this allows for a "cooler" growing effect). I then animated the flames growing in by placing keyframes right about when the vibrations got the strongest. I grouped the flames with the rocket next to allow for them to follow it simultaneously as they grew to full size. With some quick keyframes, I backed out the actual flight takeoff path, but found that the rocket started too quickly. This is when I switched over to my favorite part of Maya, the graph editor. In it, I was able to easily and visually change the speed at which it starts and finishes. At the point where I chose to have the vertical acceleration slow and turn to horizontal, I put keyframes on the flames and made them shrink back down into the boosters. I then turned the flame's visibility off when they got small enough. At that point, I just selected the booster entity, created a keyframe, then moved it down and to the side while giving some rotation and another keyframe. To make it so that the booster did not look like it was being pulled away with a string, I used the graph editor to slow the animation at the start. This created the perfect (more) realistic dropping scene.

This step seemed super easy at first, but creating a smooth curve turned out to be difficult. I will put here what I actually ended up doing. First, I extended the amount of time that the boosters and shuttle kept going up. Since I would not be using the y-axis for the shuttle again, it was easier to do it this way. At the time when the upward movement started coming to a stop, I added horizontal movement to the shuttle and a little later, added the correct rotation. By making the graph lines smoother at the ends, I was able to have the different actions blend together. That said, the animation was still somewhat jerky in two places that I was not able to find a way to completely smooth out. To help as much as possible, I deleted unnecessary keyframes and smoothed out the vertical movement of both the boosters and shuttle. This lead to something that I could work with to open up the shuttle in the next step.

For my ease, I had the shuttle come to a complete stop. I then used keyframes to shrink and move back the top part of the shuttle to make it look like it was "pulling back." Since I had already placed the rigged character in the box, all I had to do was make the character get up. I did this by simply rotating the body up while keeping the legs fixed, then when the body got to a certain height, making the legs go up too. Since this entire simulation was in space, it was MUCH easier for me to do and make somewhat realistic. Next, I rotated the body to face the spaceship while pulling it back at the same time. Around the middle of this animation, I raised the body's right arm up high and slightly raised the left one to make it look more natural. When it neared the top, I just added a few keyframes making it go back and forth. The key copy and paste functionality allowed me to easily duplicate this action. With that, the animation process was done.

This step is hard to visually show, but I will do my best with screenshots. First, I just created one huge sphere to be the "sky," which wrapped all of the land. I then created an even bigger one to be "space." This made a good base for where I should have the cameras transition from sky to space. Next, I created three different cameras. I then went into the perspective of all three of the cameras and made keyframes filming different angles of the entire takeoff. Doing this method is not standard, but I am much more familiar with video editing, so I decided to try doing it that way too. The better method to do this would be to use one camera the entire time, so I also created a fourth camera for that. I then animated that camera using the best of my shots. I ended up using a variety of cuts between keyframes, with a variety of them being smooth but some being stepped (they jump between all at once). You can see all of the camera movement going on down in the bottom of the screenshot in the graph editor.

After all of the work I had put in to this project, it was the first time I had to use something substantial from the internet in my project. Although I was hoping not to have to use images for coloring, my previous attempts to make a sky turned out - and I'll be honest - terrible. That meant I had to bite the bullet and find an image. When searching up "HDRI Skies" the first result was a website named just that - hdri-skies.com. It had great, public domain images that worked perfect. I downloaded one and then found a suitable image for space from Freepik. I then imported both images into Maya and assigned them as the color using the aiStandardSurface. Since they were large images, they took up a lot of RAM, so I had to immediately hide them. Next, I found a suitable image for the ocean. I then gave all of the simple objects color. I did that using the aiStandardSurface again. For the launch pad, I just set the color selection to ramp and made it a circular ramp with steps. I then alternated red and white to make a nice target. Since this texture was covering the entire cylinder, I opened the UV Editor. I was then able to move all of the other shapes out of the affected area because I was not planning on putting complicated textures on them later. That made it so the target was framed perfectly. With that, I was ready to color the spaceship and everything in it.

Even though this is almost the same as the last step, I decided to make this a separate step so I could describe the process I actually went through. I started out by giving the shuttle a gradient. I did the same thing I did for the target but instead kept the blending. I attached a screenshot of what the UV Editor looked like when I had finished the layout. Since the wings and other parts of the shuttle were not included in the original gradient, I decided it would look good if I colored them individually. I made the wings red and the tip blue, which blended together surprisingly well. I then moved on to the booster. At first, I made all of the boosters have stripes that alternated every single face. In the close view I designed in, it looked absolutely amazing, but as soon as I zoomed out after I finished, I found it started looking pink. I fixed this issue by just making the colors switch every three faces. I made the tops of the little boosters a darker blue and the bigger booster a nice shade of brown. For the bottoms of every thing, I used a darker tan color. I also used this same tan on the astronaut and a lighter version for other parts of it. This left me with a nice looking scene, that just needed some basic lighting before the final render (and some editing in DaVinci Resolve, I think using Flame would be going a bit too far).

To add light, all I had to do was create one light dome for everywhere and some directional light for the takeoff. By turning off shadows and making the spheres containing everything non-opaque, I ensured that they would not interfere. That left me with rendering to do. Despite the time I put into making the extra cameras for editing, I forgot how long rendering takes. Due to this, I decided to only render the main camera. Due to time constraints (and the fact that my computer is not too powerful), I had to turn down the settings for the render down. I ended up compromising with 720p and turning the sampling rate down. That is the video you see here. Once the render was complete, I was left with a folder full of hundreds of frames.

With my work in Maya finally done, it was time to move to something a little easier and more familiar to me - a video editor. All I had to do to get the main animation in was to first open up the file in the media viewer. Since Maya automatically numbers every frame, DaVinci Resolve can autodetect this. I turned this feature on by switching to sequenced display mode. At that point, I had a clip that I could simply drag into the Edit tab and edit it like normal. I decided to make a few changed before exporting the file. First, I added a fade out/in for when the shuttle switches to space. This made the transition much smoother. I also cut the ending at a good place and added another fade effect. With that final export, I had my final video ready to upload to YouTube.

With little experience, there were many issues that came up. From using the wrong kind of shape to not knowing just the right command, there was always something. For example, one of the best examples is when I was trying to edit the keyframes in a clip. It seemed so simple, but it was something that I had never needed to do before. I spent a significant amount of time on a plane, without WiFi, trying to figure out how it was done. I eventually moved on and assured myself that it would be one Google search away. After too many Google searches when I was home, I had gotten the slightest bit closer, with the clip switching to keyframes, but with all of the transition keyframes in between. Most users of Maya could have told me how to do that, because like many things in Maya, it was SUPER simple, meaning that to anyone else, it was so simple that there is no point for a tutorial. In the end, all I had to do was right-click the clip and click “Bake and delete.” That was just one of many challenges I had. Another kind of funny thing that happened was that at some point, I deleted the skull and cross bones from the flag on the boat. I only realized this later, after I had taken multiple screenshots. You can go back and look at Step 11 to see that. Another example of a small error I made was that I faced the astronaut’s head the wrong way, making it’s right arm the right in my view. Worst of all was something that happened to me when I finally thought I had the animation complete. After completing it, I saved my project and closed out Maya. When I came back the next day, I found the astronaut frame completely messed up. I had known something was wrong previously, since I was getting some errors, but they did not seem to be affecting my project in any way so I just ignored them. But when I came back to find my character stretched out across the entire screen, with some parts seemingly locked in different positions, I thought I would have to start over. After spending an hour trying to figure out what in the world I had done wrong, I knew that at some point I had deleted important parts of the skeleton. I knew there was a correct way to fix it, but it had been working before so I continued searching. All I had to do was change a single setting in preferences.

Although this project turned out great, there was also a LOT of room for improvement. Below I have listed just a few improvement ideas I had:

1. Give sails fabric texture for simulation
2. Make complete soundtrack
3. Simulate the water
4. Add actual texture detail to everything
5. Make the entire animation more efficient, not using unnecessary things