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.

Adding an engine sound to an animation.

First we need an engine sound to work from. I found www.freesound.org. This site gives me a huge data base of sounds. I simply registered; so I could download, found the sounds I wanted and downloaded it. This is what I found:

This sound is perfect for me because it's a good steady sound. The volume doesn't get quieter or louder, the pitch stays the same, no background interference, however it is only like this for a short period of time so now I just need to cut that out and loop it, for this I will use a free sound editing program called Audacity.

There are several ways I can add sound to this rendered animation, I can either add it after, so render the animation go into a video program and add the sound and to adjust the sound in the video program. This way I can get fade in and fade out effects as the plane fly's by. Or I can add the sound in the 3Ds max program and the sound will get rendered with it. I prefer this second way, it gives me more control over the time line and to get it to meat the animation as close as possible.

Every things ready I need to import the sound. Firstly I need to add a 'Helper' called sound. This is so I can Anchor a sound to it.

Place on the scene at coordinates Z-0, X-0, Y-0. Then to add the sound to it. Open up 'Track view-Curve editor'.

Make sure you have the Sound helped selected. Double click the word 'Sound' in the sub tree menu. and I need to add the sound I need to use.

I now have a work sound in my scene, so if I were to render this animation I will have the sound added with it.

However I have a problem my camera zooms in onto the plane and the zooms out, so I need to volume to increase and then decrease; fade in, fade out.

In the sub tree menu I need to click the plus sign and some options sound come out; Waveform and Volume. It's the volume I need to edit.

The green dotted line you can see is the max volume of the sound. Underneath is a time line. This time line is exact same time line as the one in the scene, so I can match them up.

So I need to add a curve. I can do this by using the 'Draw Curves' tool. I need to add points where the volume reaches the lowest and highest points.

My curve is now in place and I now have fade in and fade out effects.

First Render

This render shows how it will look in the animation I am going to do. A render is a system which creates images, or movies with more visual effects, such as reflections and much more improved lighting and shadows. You can come out with some great effects. A lot more needs to be improved and added. The flaps need to be added, holes where the engine exhaust pipes are.

Animating a camera

For my animation to make it easier, the plane will not move whats so ever, apart from the propellers spinning. Instead everything else will move past it, to give the illusion that it's moving. For this demonstration animation, I'm going to set the time line for 10 seconds.

And we need to add at tracking camera and set it in front of the plane at a far distance.

The tracking camera is so it stays focused on the plane. I now need to go into camera view. I now need to add a position and roll keyframe to the camera.


Select Autokey and go to the end of the time scale.

I need to move the camera so it's now behind the plane, I can do this by using the zoom function. Go to the point where the camera collides into the plane and role the camera so that instead of the camera going through the plane it goes over.

Basic texture and materials using Arch+Design.

Arch and design is very usefull it's full of pre-set material settings. Setting being transparency, reflection and glossiness, which then can be applied to the objects.