hey everyone!
This is my first post on this site, so I was thinking I’ll just show the latest clip I’ve finished in Blender:
I spent 2 weeks modelling and texturing the ship, but only 2 days for the plane(perhaps you notice the difference in quality!)
It’s not perfect, but since it took 3 days to render I’d rather live with the flaws than re-render it
Unless of course I get some constructive criticism, which I guess is why I am posting it
The plane is a Mitsubishi Zero, and the ship is a kind of cross between a Class G and H type destroyer
Verry nice, gotta love the shader on the zero,
only crits are that a: the flak is not quite transparent enough - it looks kinda too plasticy…
Second crit is that the wake of the boat is way to short.
Other than that its awsome, I second the call for a wireframe
Here are the shots:
and the wireframe of the destroyer:
Thanks for those useful crits on the smoke and wake, Saypen. I agree, but I’m having trouble making the wake as long as it should be, because the whiteness of the water is controlled by an animated stencil animation, and unless I make the stencil animation absolutely huge and CPU-draining, that’s as long as I can get the wake. The animated stencil is already 1024x1024 pixels, so every frame of that is quite a large sized picture, and I can’t really compress the stencil animaiton or I’ll get nasty artifacts. Any ideas, anyone?
but I’m having trouble making the wake as long as it should be, because the whiteness of the water is controlled by an animated stencil animation, and unless I make the stencil animation absolutely huge and CPU-draining, that’s as long as I can get the wake
Perhaps you could have one wake animation for the wake directly near/behind the ship and then have another vertically tiling wake with an alpha channel blend out behind that (you get what I mean?)
Also if you wanted to make the scene look really chaotic and awsome (and more realistic) adding machine gun AA to the ship would be cool, when the aircraft is that close to the plane heavy (big shell) flak like you have in the movie would be virtually useless as it is so inaccurate and so smaller machine cannons and guns where used. Could get pretty crazy on the effects side though… Theres lots of videos on you tube of the type of AA that I mean… its pretty deadly stuff
Thanks for the input!
Using more than one stencil is something I didn’t think of.
The machine gun fire is definitely a good idea - especially since I made the ship model with some machine guns already mounted on the railings - but obviously I can’t post animation renders without making you wait a few days!
@bigbad:
actually amazingly it was that very game, Battlefield 1942, that inspired me to make this animaion - the intro movie that is. I saw the pre-rendered intro movie and thought I could do something of similar/better quality
The smoke is just an image created in GIMP with an alpha channel to make the smoke transparent and the image is split into four variations of a puff of smoke. The guns on the plane emit particles, which have billboard set and the image is a random selection of the four smoke puffs. The 5x motion blur basically turns the smoke into streaks of grey, which helps a bit too.
The tracer bullets are two intersecting planes, elongated into a streak, used as the object to be duplicated in particles, and emitted at high speed from the plane’s gun object. The texture on the tracer object is just a Blend texture, halo, mapped to default UV, and affecting the colour and alpha of the tracer object.
I described most of the method for the wake above, but I’ll also add that I made the wake’s stencil animation by moving the ship to a layer of it’s own, making it invisible and rendering an animation of it from above as it emitted white, fuzzy particles while moving along its animated path.
I think that you have done very well, the quality is very good(reminds me of the the show dogfights).
My question is where is the flak bursts coming from? It does not appear to be coming from the ship. The 5 inch cannons don’t track the Zero. On top of that no light to medium fire( .50 cal, and 20mm cannons, those would have tracers) is coming from the ship. I would just expect more ship animation.
Did you animate the ocean? It looks static, and a little flat. It doesn’t seem to have any waves.
Thanks, I look forward to seeing more of your work.
That was absolutely amazing! 5 stars from me. The camera was awesome, loved the shaking. My only crit is that the AA guns stopped firing after the plane passed over it.
Okay, you called it ,Kamris_Ajelico!
That is sheer laziness on my part that the ship doesn’t have any animation to track and fire at the plane, although to Avenger96 I could easily say in my defence that at that range, the flak guns could not keep up with a plane pulling out of a steep dive only ten metres above the ship, hence the lack of continuing AA after the plane passes over.
The ocean is animated and I have no regrets on it; I referenced everything from a visual encyclopedia of sea warfare, and that is a very typical wave size and height. It originally was just a flat, normalmapped plane, but the waterline on the ship looked horrendous, so I subdivided the plane all night long and used the texture for displacement to create a little more wavy effect at the waterline.
An admission:
The plane is only travelling at about half the speed of a real diving Zero, but the camera work and view angle hopefully covered that up!
Yeah, I can see the waves now(played it in HQ).
I must say that I am impressed. It makes me want to dust off my half-finished F4F model.
I would love to see a wire of the Zero.
So is there any chance of seeing an animated ship in the future?
