G4M "Betty" Bomber and P-38 Lightning

[WShawn]

Hi:

I'm doing animations for a video that will part of an exhibit at the Museum of Flight (http://flight.projecttest.net/Display.asp?Page=Bougainville) in Seattle. The exhibit describes the 1943 mission in which a group of P-38 Lightnings were sent to shoot down a Mitsubishi G4M "Betty" bomber carrying Admiral Yamamoto. His plane was shot down over Bougainville Island. A second bomber was shot down over the water. Here's a 900K Quicktime showing what I've come up with so far:

http://homepage.mac.com/wshawn/MuseumofFlight/Betty%20Attacked%20Sor%20200K.mov

http://homepage.mac.com/wshawn/MuseumofFlight/Betty-renders.jpg

This is the first time I've done something like this. I usually do corporate or infomercial stuff. The planes are subpatch models. I could have purchased detailed models for a fraction of the cost of my time, but I wanted to keep the poly count relatively low, and it's more fun to do it yourself. They could be more detailed, but the budget isn't there for super realism. I won't be doing any radiosity renders on this. As it is, I'll probably put ten times the hours into this as the budget calls for, but the exhibit honors a WWII hero, Rex Barber, and I'm having fun.

I'm still working out how I want to show the tracer bullets, and I want them to interact with the plane as they hit. And the fire and smoke needs work; I rarely use hypervoxels. These look really strobey. I was hoping to add motion blur in a post production process if possible.

I also need to figure out a way to soften the detail of the water in the distance. It's not NTSC-friendly. The sky is HDR Skytracer images mapped to a cube.

Comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics
Portland, Oregon

[Rhino]

Great to see animations, well done for putting extra time into it to make it worthwhile.

A few ideas,

>I'd add a texture channel to the cameras HPB channels to give it a little vibration and also add some banking to the camera motion path. If you watch the horizon it stays too level and feels a little odd.

>I'd add some light fog to haze the horizon and give the scene a little depth. Helps with unwanted scintilation too.

>This scene would also work well for a rack-focus DOF effect. Start with the chaser plane and rack forward to the forground plane as the engine gets hit. This would also help with the sea detail causing unwanted scintilation.

[Zarathustra]

Yeah, I had a very similiar looking ocean scene for an animation of Columbus' ships. Put a gradient set to distance from camera on the bump and displacement channel for the ocean to get rid of that noise. The DOF is always nice and will get rid of it, too, but in case you can't afford the rendertime of DOF the gradient should help.

The modeling seems fine to me. I think it could be lit better, though. Some colored lights to simulate the bounce from the sky and water for starters. The texturing looks flat, but I'm leaning towards believing that's due to lighting.

I figured out a long time ago it's hard to churn out the dull work 9-5 then go home and do your own, quality work. I figured I might as well make the "real" work be my quality work, regardless of how stupid the projects might be. You should consider yourself lucky to get a cool project like this and by all means you should be putting in your own time to make this better then expected. The hell with what your company's accounting department may say.:)

[Gardul]

how did you make the fire?

[WShawn]

Hi:

Thanks for the feedback.

In an earlier test animation I did add some noise to the X and Y channels to make it look a little handheld, but it just made the foreground plane look shakey. I'll try it using the rotation channels.

Here's an earlier test I did with the Lightning which sort of captures the handheld look I might go for:

P-38 Test (http://homepage.mac.com/wshawn/MuseumofFlight/P38%20Zoom%20Flyby%20test%20Sor.mov)

The zoom probably isn't appropriate for an air-to-air POV, but it adds energy.

I do have some fog in the scene; I'll keep tweaking that. I had played with a gradient to reduce the bumpiness of the distant textures, but then the clouds were being perfectly reflected in the distance, which looked weird. I need to find something in between.

Regarding the textures, what would you do to make them look less flat? I added a fair amount of weathering to the image maps and more distressing with some IFW panel textures. I know some of the panel line bump maps are a little thick, but I can live with that. What else could I try? I have a blue tinted distant light pointing up from the water as a sort of reflective fill, but it might be filling it too much; it should probably be darker underneath the plane.

Fortunately, we own our own business, so I can put as much time into this as I want. I told this client that I'd have to give full-paying clients priority over this project.

Thanks again.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[WShawn]

Gardul:

The fire was created using hypervoxels.

Basically I made a null, parented it to the bomber, added a particle emitter to it and played around with the birth rate and velocity. Once I had the particles moving the way I wanted, I went to Scene-Volumetrics and added hypervoxels. I then went to the Preset shelf and picked one of the fire effects as a starting point. I did the same basic thing for the smoke.

Shawn