Organising the animation

Today I spent some time organising my animation by creating the skybox, importing my star wars models and setting up the layers (for my skybox) as well as creating groups.

(Screenshot of my groups in the outliner)

An early problem I encountered when beginning my animation is that I kept clicking the sky box by accident quite often. This became irritating however I was able to find a solution to counter this issue. I selected my sky box (sphere) and in the layer editor, created a new layer called "Template." After doing this, the sky box would no longer select when clicked on and instead if I need to select the sky box, I can do so by using the outliner.

I also spent time creating space rocks for my animation. These will be animated by rotating slowly throughout the animation. This is to prevent the animation from being plain and will also interact with one of my ships during the animation.  I have also used bump mapping on the rock to give the rock a more realistic look since the directional light should bounce off the bump mapping of the rock.