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