Animating an ariel dog fight.

To start off I want to say that I hate clouds, creating a realistic cloud in 3Ds Max is time consuming, and the tutorials on it just didn't help me at all. So in the end I had to add clouds by using thousands of gizmos with volume fog, this made something that looks cloud like but not like a real cloud. It looks better then it did with the image I placed as a background in the environments section of render setup. Once I had the 'cloudscape' set up as a scene set. I was able to import in the models of the flying planes, not the ones with the wheels and started to animate a dog fight.

There is only one thing I can say about how the animated scene I did turned out like in my option, utter rubbish. While the cloud looks better then I had originally feared and go very well with the background, the camera placement and the action are rushed. Which is because the whole scene was rushed after I spend most of the time trying to get the clouds to look like clouds and work as I wanted. This left me to rush thought the actual scene and not as I had originally planed do a separate in depth storyboard of the whole fight scene.

It shows that the final aerial fight was thrown together and that I wasn't able to clearly plan out what I wanted to happen when. If I could do it again I would start earlier on the whole thing and given up on realistic cloud and go with the gizmos sooner. Another thing I would do is go over the main storyboard and sort out who would be doing which scene of the animation earlier on as there was some confusion I felt as to who was doing what bit within the group. Which led to some scenes being rushed.

The final Problem I had was with the rendering, it took a real age and to cut back the time I was forced to shorten  all of the sections of the scene so that it would render. This means that some of the bits to my scene are over very quickly and are to me obversely cut.

So in all I don't like the way my scene went at all, and the only redeeming feature is the quality of the image looks.

 

What do I think of my Models?

There all right, they turned out better then I had hoped, while the Japanese plane had the most work done to it I feel the American plane was the better of the two. That is probably because it was the second one I did and I was able to work out any issues that arose. Not that I had any really, once I followed the YouTube tutorial the propellers worked nicely and with the blur effect looked great. Model wise I had no problems, although I don't know what to expect from the animation part of things.

Wheel out the models

As in some of our planed scenes in the animation section required a view of our planes on the ground I created to models simple by saving the original models under a new name and then adding in the wheels on the bottom of the plane.

American Plane 1

For the American plane model I went thought the same modeling method as the Japanese plane only this time I started by making the basic shape of the American plane then modifying it. In this case I wanted to make the plane heavy and large. I made the all ready large nose larger and added more exhausts then necessary. A large gun finished this off.

With both models finished I was able to concentrate on the materials for the Japanese plane I went for what I felt were the colours of Japan red, gold and white, however the white made the plane cartoon-y and I changed it to silver. The American plane was simply metals and camouflage, I was lucky as I found a image from Google that fit my model perfectly. To get the materials to cover only certain areas of my model I simple selected where I wanted it to go in edible poly polygon setting, and dragged the material to that section.

Japanese Plane 1

To create the Japanese plane I started with a cylinder for the body and in edible poly manipulated it into the shape of the planes body. For the wings I did the same thing to another cylinder, to save time however for the tail fin I cloned the wing cylinder and scaled it down before reshaping it to look like the upright fin. Once I had the basic shape of one of the Japanese planes that fought in Pearl Harbour I started to modify it to look like something from the world we are setting everthing in. The wings I manipulated to turn up slightly, so that they emulated the roof curve of Japanese buildings. I then created a dragons head in the Japanese style and added that to the front of the plane. Once I had got the model to fit in with the setting while still keeping the a recognizable resemblance to the planes used in the bombing I started on the propeller, I was able to find this tutorial on youtube that helped me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeMdeZzn4c4 after that I made sure to check that all but the propeller where attached into on e shape and that the propeller was linked so that everything moved around together.