Bibliography

Research:

'Fighter aircraft of world wars 1 & 2' by Francis Crosby

'Concept aircraft - The aviation fact file'

Manchester Science and Industry Museum

http://www.mosi.org.uk/

Sounds and Music

http://http://www.youtube.com//

http://www.freesound.org/

First of the few film footage:

http://www.archive.org/details/TheFirstOfTheFew

Evaluation

I thought that this has been the most interesting and productive project I have done. It have been interested in it all the way through. Mainly because 3D modelling and animating is something I enjoy! I am also very happy with my final animation movie. I have come up with a really good story board which includes an old film called 'First of the few' and with that added some of my animation of a spitfire, it also shows the contrast of old and new, with a very old black and white film with a very modern updated animation. However I also really enjoyed building the model Spitfire. Building the spitfire really taught me some of the history of the plane, but also learning how it was built, understanding the shapes, curves of the plane.

I did receive a comment on the plane when it was being textured.

"There are a few bits that are noticeably "off". The wings are looking very thick for starters."

However I thought I was too far in development to go back and fix this issue, my time is limited. Though i did notice another problem that the tail was dipping down. I fixed this so it was straight.

Though there are some bad points. One is the resolution of the 'First of the few' film. Sadly I couldn't find a high resolution version of the film, they were all limited to this size. I wanted my animation movie to be 1280x720. I didn't want to scale the 'First of the few' footage bigger as it would become very distorted and pixelated. The film is already damaged as it is now with hairs, marks and scratches on it. So I've had to keep the film footage the same size and the animation footage the same. I could of made the animation footage smaller, but then the video would be to small and I wouldn't be happy with it. However keeping this in mind, I could have made the animation footage black and white and make the animation look old, like the film. Keeping the same stlye.

Final Animation!

I have finished my final animation! You can either watch a high quality version on CD1. Or watch it online on Youtube.com.

If you also check the Youtube link thre also maybe Feedback from other viewers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKrcF0peS2s&fmt=22

Getting ready for the final

I also wanted to create a crash scene with an enemy plane. However I don't have an enemy plane. So I am going to have to think of a different way of showing it. I am going to have a driver eye view of the plane crashing.

On the 2nd CD look for the video 'scene16'.

I then wanted an under water scene with bubbles, I did this.

On the 2nd CD look for the video 'scene23'

For this I need some water noice. I checked youtube for an underwater sound. Due to constraints I coul not do this, I don't have any underwater sound exquipment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7SCsVXiF4Q

I also needed a shoot scene like the one of the film.

I also re-created this, on the 2nd CD look for 'Scene131' and for the second part look for 'Scene132'.

This scene adds a lots of action to the animation.

Another scene that I thought of that wasn't in the film and I wanted to add was a lock on shot of the plane flying. One that you would see in in a game. So I had ago and I went and did it. I really like these scenes because it looks real! I really like the effect it makes you feal like your really there.

On the 2nd CD look for 'Scene25'.

Music

I have used two music tracks, both the same songs but different versions. I need music that fits the theme of the animation and if I have more then one track in the animation it must fit the same style of music. I already have one song in it, which is the Battlefield 1943 theme but at the beginning I want some more music to give it a dramtic start. I have been searching around and I have found this song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5HqlYBowvg&feature=related

Half way through at 1 mintue it changes to the the 1943 theme, so I'm not repeating it I'm going to keep the first bit and cut the second part out.

The two tracks are on the second CD

Animation Scenes

Scene 2 a/b (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene2a' and 'Scene2b'.)

This will be one of the first scenes. It's simply a squadron of spitfires flying across. This will be shown just after the film footage of the planes taking off. This has been rendered in 3Ds max. I have used a stationary camera with the plans flying by and a cloud in the background. Total time of 10 seconds, this is a very simple scene, but as this is only the beginning I don't want anything to dramatic.

Scene 3 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene3')

This scene will be mixed in with the pilot to station master conversation. I don't want the pilot to station master conversation to just be constant talking as it will get boring and uninteresting, it will add a bit more action into it and will also be a small build up to the fight. This is a simple tracking shot of the planes flying, the cloud in the background just adds some more movement. With out the cloud the plane would look like it's going no where.

 

 

However in this scene there is a problem, the wheels wasn't linked to the plane so it got left behind in the animation, however this can be mistaken as another plane, or a bird.

 

Scene4 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene5', the file names are a bit out of order as they were made at different times.), Scene 5 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene9'.) and Scene 6 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene10b'.).

 

These three scenes are the start of the attack. They will be played one after the other.

 

Scene 7 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene11')

 

This next scene includes water in it. I thought to give my film some variation I should have a water scene in it, so it's not just sky. I had some trouble creating this water effect so I had to search for a tutorial. I found out there are lots of different ways to create water, but I decided to stick to the easy solution and a good solution it was. The way to do it was to use the water texture in 'Arch and Design', it has pre-set settings making it easier for me!

 

Scene 8 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene6a')

This next scene is a simple swoop down and over. In this animation, if you look closely the animation is a bit uneven, it's not smooth. This is probably because I used the wrong animation assign controller.

Scene 9 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene4b')

This scene there is a plane flying over and another doing a barrel role, this is making things a bit more exciting. However, when saving it to an output the settings were wrong, they were set to 'Thoughsand of colours' and not 'Million of colours', so I have some nasty streaks on it.

Scene 10 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene7')

This time I wanted something different again. So I went to have a look at the original film and I found this:

So I thought I could do an animation of this, and I did. I think this scene looks really good!

Scene 11 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene12b')

I now want a fighting scene. Again I went back to the original film.

So I re-produced this scene. However in this scene the spitfire is using it's guns. I'm going to take into account of my earlier post about bullet fire and motion blur. Also, for the bullet fire sound I'm going to render the sound with the animation, this will give me more control of when the sound should start.

As you can see in the image above the bullet comes out of the turret and on the right you can see the wave form of the bullet sound.

There is a test clip of all this in action on the 3rd CD called 'Test Animation 1'

Beginning introduction titles.

To create the introduction titles I wanted to have a war time theme. Something that will stand out, something that wont look out of place and something that will make it look dramatic. So for the background of the titles I need a texture that looks warn, roting wood or rusted metal. I have decided to go with rusted metal, rotting wood doesn't have that strong, but cold feeling to it. I found this image on the Internet:

It's a very poor image, but it's perfect for what I want. It's a very small image but that can be sorted out. I loaded it up in Photoshop and made the image the size of the final animation clip which is 1280x720. I then went into filters and chose Distort > Defuse Glow.

I can now add some text onto this.

I have added some text and also added a nice drop shadow, just to make it look a bit more atmospheric.

There will be four of these, one that introduces the original film, 'First of the few', 'Battle of Britain', '1942' and 'Michael Whiteley'. These will fade in, and fade out. These affects will be added in after effects.

As you can see I have control over the brightness and contrast. The plan is at the beginning of the image it will be black it will then brighten and then go back. You can see that some rows have diamonds in them, these are key frames, these key frames are fixed value so at that particular time it will be that value. The first key frames are -100 so it will be totally black. The second key frames for brightness will be 30 and for contrast it will be 50, it looks better to have a higher contrast because it will stand out more and seem like it's flashing, the third key frames will be -100 again because that's the fade out.

A small hiccup

In the film there is apart where a Spitfire spots the German planes, and then shows the German planes flying by. My issues is that I do not have a German plan to animate with, I haven't built one. I don't want to seriously cut a lot of film or remove any important footage because then I will be building my own story, I want to stick with the original First of the few story line. So I'm going to keep the exterior shot of the German plans flying by.

Animation Start

To put all my scenes together, add music and to add special effects I am going to use Adoby After Effects. I will need to import all of my vidoes into this program, and them put it all together, cutting scenes up so I can remove bits of film I don't want and also cutting film because it maybe to long. It can be very fidderly, making sure you don't cut out any sound from the films so when someone speeks they don't get cut off.

As the orginal film footage keeps switching from exteria back into interia shots means I have to do alot more snipping of the film because I don't need the exteria shots. I could just put the whole film in as one whole section and just put my animation footage over it, but that will give me less control of how much of my animation footage I can put it. So having them cut up like this means my animation can be any length of time.

Bullet animation

For some scenes the spitfire is firring. So I can make this possible I'm going to have to do some attempts at bullet fire and movement. A bullet can be reach speeds of 500mph, so for them to be seen on a 25fps animation, motion blur must be applied otherwise it will not be seen. Also looking a films clips with fires about two rounds per second. However this is not 100% accurate information, but it will be okay for what I'm doing.

As the bullet is travelling at such a speed there is no need to make the bullet very detailed a simple cylinder will do with a gold material on it.

This is what I have quickly made.

I have animated it to fly across the screen twice I have rendered a very short clip of it in action.

Cloud reduction

To speed up rendering time I'm going to make clouds one big object (One big poly) and not use particles. Particles can take a lot more time because it uses more polys scattered around one area, where as if I use one big poly it will speed up rendering by 3 times.

So I have made images of the particle effects and made them an image. Here are some good examples:


I can now use these in my scenes and my render time will greatly be reduced.

Rendering animation and the time it takes

Rendering an animation at a high resolution can take a very long time. I ran some tests. I had a time scale of 15 seconds. 5 Spitfires flying across the sky, with an added cloud on the background. The estimated time of completion two weeks. After messing around by hiding some objects I found out that the cloud was the main cause of the speed, then the planes. There are many ways I can improve the speed of rendering. I can improve my computer hardware, I have purchased two sticks of 2GB RAM. Which will give me a total of 6GB of RAM, which should speed up my PC by a lot! Another thing I am going to have to do is reduce the resolution, instead of 1920x1080 too 1280x720. However the best thing I can do is reduce the polys and texture sizes of the actual models.I'm going to reduce the texture map to 512x512, x3 the size it was. On the plane I'm going to use the weld tool to reduce the polys, which will reduces them. The only reason I can reduces the detail is because in this scene the objects are far away and you will not be able to notice the detail that has been reduced.

Rendering clouds

For my animation to work I need to create a sky scene so I need to create clouds. I'm very unsure on how to do this so I'm going to look for some tutorials on how to do this, searching Google I typed in '3ds max creating clouds'. I found this:

http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials_3/jussing_clouds/creating_clouds_3dsmax01.php

This is what I managed to create:

The first of the few picture film

This film can be downloaded legally for free, however it has a draw back, the quietly isn't very good, my animation will be a lot high resolution then the film, I am going to make my animation resolution 1920x1080 and keep the movie footage the same. I may make the original movie footage bigger, but not so big that it becomes blurry and distorted.

I downloaded the film from here: http://www.archive.org/details/TheFirstOfTheFew

Story borad

I have drawn out in my sketch book a very rough story borad of what I'm going to do. I am going to use original footage from the film and also replace the old spitfire footage with my own animation footage. The old footage I'm going to use is the big where there are pilot and station master conversations. I have reviewed the film and my story borad has been made out so the spitfire shots are pretty much the same as on the film. If the animation is different people watching the clip maybe miss lead by what happens.

I have also included some music. I have chosen a theme tune from a game called 'Battlefield 1943'. This game has planes included and it's set around the same time era. However the game is set for the war in the Pacific. However it is still very suited.

The theme tune can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEGD-tQQqbA

Render

Texturing.

I now need to add a texure. I have made an 2048x2048, it's a large map but There is a lot in this made and I need the detail.

I have taken a print screen of the unwrap and pasted it on the texture so I know where things are and where to paint.

Looking at the scetch book I have made some camo artwork. This shows the colours I should use and a basic design of what the camo should look like. However the colours are made from oil pastles and not the correct colour type. I'm going to have to go to my photographs and make a colour chart.

I can simply apply the camo colour by using the brush tool and making the hardness on 50%.

I'm not going to add the Red, white and blue symbols. I will create these by painting them and then to scan them in and go over them in photoshop.

Now I have created these I can paste them onto my main map.

Just to make it more realistic I'm going to add the gap inbetween two sheets of metal.

To do this I have only created a line and added a very light drop shadow on it.

Also to make these more like gaps in sheets of metal I'm going to add some screws to hold them in place. I have gone back to have a look at my photographs for help.

I have digitaly re-created it in photoshop.The I could have made the screw to blend in with the body, but as thy are very small when placed on the main map there are n ot enough pixels to show them up, they juts blend in. So I have made them a much darker colour, so they will show up alot better.

I also need to add the CRS letting on the side of the plane. Looking through the fonts I can not find it, so I'm going have to make it my self. To do this I'm going to use the line tool.

Unwrapping a model for texture

Unwrapping a model is like unwrapping a card board box and making a net for whcih a texture can be applied on. Unwrapping a model is very time consuming. However due to time limitations I don't have the time to do this. So I'm going to take a short cut. I'm going to use auto-unwrap. This feature is dissaproved by many 3Ds nax users because it cab be very unrilable. However sometimes is can make life a lot easier. You just need to mess around with the settings.

The image shown bellow shows the auto-unwrap tool on the right and the end result of it on the left.

With this now I will edit this to make it use full use of the map and to stick some of the smaller pieces with the big pieces. So I don't have little polys in different places scatted around the map.

I have now put it all together. I have re-scaled some parts for more detail, I have stuck together single polys with a much larger group, and everything has been plased in the right places.

Wheels

The wheels and the surrounding supports holding the wheels don't need to be very detailed as most of the time they will be hidden under the wing, however it still needs to be done to a good standard just incase they do get used.

Here we have the wheel and support mesh.

Here we have the texture for the wheel and supports. On the left we have the texture for the tier and on the right is the section for the metal supports. In the picture below this is an image showing how the tier is mapped out over the texture.

Final render

Bent tail

I have realised after reviewing some of my photos and my model that the tail was bowing down at the back, it should be straight. Fixed!

Bent

Straight

Propeller improvemens

Making the propellers is a difficult task. For one it's a very strange shape and also it twists around. The propeller is designed like this because it needs to make a forward force and for the plane to move.

(Check page two of the sketch book to see drawings of some designs I have done)

Here is a picture of the original propeller with no improvements.

New propeller:

Now to move them into place and the replace the old ones.

Now with added motion blur.

I'm now going to add some texture to them.

I'm going to go into Photoshop and make a new image. The will be sized 256x256. This may seem like an unusual size but it's in the power of 2. This is what sizes games work from, if the texture sizes is not to the power of two the texture will not work, however I'm not using this plane for a game, but it's a good template to work from.

I have filled it in with basic colours.

At the moment it looks very basic and just wont do for my plane so I need to go and find a picture of some weathering. While at the Science and industry museum I took some pictures of some materials for my plane. So I can use one of them.

I'm going to manipulate the image so it gives a streek effect so it looks like the propeller has been spinning at high speed.

I have used Brush strokes - Angled Strokes to create a streek like effect to it.

I have appied it to the texture as a new layer.

Then to select an overlay effect. I have chocen Overlay because it has given me a satisfide effect.

However I think it could look better so I have changed the levels.

Now to appie the material to the mesh and too make it fit the mesh properly, for this I am going to use UVW mapping. It's a very basic tool for mapping textures to mesh but suitable for my propeller.

I'm now going back into the material propertys and select a pre-set of material propertys.

I went for Matte Plastic, because it gave me the right reflectiverty settings, light reflection and roughness.

For this render to work I need to change the render propertys. At the moment I am using 'mental.ray.lighting.high' I need to change this too 'mental.ray.photometric.lighting.with.gi'. This will apply the materials I have chosen, so it will make the plane less glossy and apply any textures.

Also to remember to add a daylight system. This day light system has been set up to work just like are real sun, it has month, day, year settings so you can set the sun up to a particular day in time.

He is the final result.