Development > Artwork

Little experiment for cinematic - air combat

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Winter:
I can tell you why the clouds don't look natural.

1. The clouds are too evenly shaped and spaced. They're all hanging around at the same height, and it's easy to tell that they all follow the same basic pattern. Is there a better randomisation available?

2. The 'middle' layer of cloud above the interceptor is terrible, just obvious 2d sprites. You'd be better off cutting it entirely.

3. There's too many of them. When have you ever seen this many clouds so evenly broken up, all the way to the horizon? At the same height? Without any large patches of sky or anything between them?

Overall, though, it's quite promising and my favourite bit by far is the middle part of the saracen.avi. The camera panning makes the bottom layer of cloud look almost natural until it shows the neverending horizon of them.

Regards,
Winter

Destructavator:
Hmmm, I think you're right, now that you've pointed it out.  It could be that the free cloud generator can't do what I'm trying to make it do, or that I'm not using it effectively, or a combination of the two.

I did some more clips, but this time with a different approach - instead of taking one component of a scene (clouds) and pushing that one component, I worked with the terrain generator I found and came up with this:

http://www.destructavator.com/public/skyflight5.avi

Personally I think this approach might be better, although in this particular video clip I think I messed up on the lighting, making it a little too bright with not enough shadows, I don't know, what do you (and everyone else) think?

Psawhn:
I've actually been studying aerial photos and I want to eventually try my hand at an interception animation. The main problem is I don't quite have the time (I still have to finish the texture on that wormhole generator - and it's been how long?) But I'll try to give some hints to help things out.

Afterburner flames:
I gave a couple hints for engine textures a while ago: http://ufoai.ninex.info/forum/index.php?topic=2628.msg16664#msg16664

Aircraft do not run on afterburner all the time. It's a huge waste of fuel, of course. If you looked into the nozzle of a non-afterburning engine, it'd look dark because the combustion happens in front of the turbine blades. This means you don't have to create any afterburner flames most of the time.

When a jet engine is in afterburner, what you see depends on the lighting. For some afterburners and bright lighting (daytime), all you'd see is a glow inside the engine. http://www.pw.utc.com/StaticFiles/Pratt%20&%20Whitney/News/Press%20Releases/Assets/Images/F35_afterburner.jpg For others (such as in dusk/night) you'd see a nice long, flamey tail. http://www.cloud9photography.us/ab/AB06_F-14NIGHT_PETERMANCUS.jpg A lot of the time, all you actually see are the shock diamonds - http://www.geocities.com/jiyangc/f22afterburner2.jpg http://farm1.static.flickr.com/217/487578907_da7944a9e4.jpg/f22afterburner2.jpg,

Not only that, but the Saracen has vanes covering its engine to vector thrust for STOL. I don't think its afterburner would even create nice, long flames or shock diamonds. Instead, when I made my renders, I used just engine glow and heat distortion. http://ufoai.ninex.info/forum/index.php?topic=1675.msg9935#msg9935
To make the engine glow, I put several semitransparent orange planes inside the engine. To make the heat distortion, I spilled out really ugly cloud textures with 'color' enabled - it looks like Super Magical Rainbow Plane! ;) But I fed this layer of particles into the compositor to drive a displacement node, which simulates the distortion you get with strong temperature gradients in air.

Atmosphere/Clouds:
One thing that will really help the sky is to use the new atmospheric shader in the latest blender. http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-248/sun-sky-and-atmosphere/ I think adding those effects will increase the quality by an order of magnutude. :)

On the subject of clouds - those are tough to do convincingly in blender. In all my renders I simply used background plates. With the atmosphere shader outlined above, it may be better to not have any clouds at all until blender gets a proper volumetric shader.
The current clouds you have in the last animation look like they are at a very high altitude, so they should be wispy ice clouds, but they have the shape and texture of mid-level altocululus clouds. Unfortunately, I don't know how to make nice wispy cirrus clouds procedurally in blender, so you might want to just paint or download some textures, then use those instead.

The 3D clouds generated by that automatic generator added a lot by their very nature of being 3D. The problem is the way the generator seems to work: it fills in a cube with a procedural cloud. If you have an infinite grid of equally sized cubes as your layer of clouds, you get an infinite grid of equally sized cube-like clouds which, of course, looks very unnatural. Maybe the best way to fix that is to base the cloud layer off of randomly placed pyramids - the pyramids should be all sizes and shapes, and pseudorandomly placed to encourage overlapping and large gaps.
Something I want to try (again when I have the time) is to make a mesh representing the top surface of a cumulus cloud formation and use SSS approximation, and maybe a few sprays of particles and compositor post-processing for the fuzziness.


If you are going to use textured planes as clouds, also keep in mind the curvature of the earth. Although the landscape will have no visible curvature except at extremely high altitudes, a 'solid layer' of cirrus clouds will eventually touch the horizon - the two exceptions are if the cloud formation does not extend that far, or atmospheric haze obscures the distant clouds.

The landscape in the latest image looks good, but a little 'video-gamey.' Fixing light and shadows should help with that a lot. My ultimate goal is to be able to create procedurally-produced landscapes on moving planes (such that the landscape is always underneath the action, regardless of how far the planes fly), but creating convincing terrain features and colours is something that still eludes me.

I really want to know how the guys that make Dogfights! make their landscapes. :)


Camera movement/Animation:
Winter's already said that he likes shakey-cam, and I also love the effect when it's done properly. Effective animation and realistic camera movement can lend a lot of realistic weight to an otherwise cartoony scene.

Camera rigs:
Instead of just a camera floating through air, it can become somewhat complicated. The simplest camera rig has a free-floating camera with a track-to constraint set on an empty.

One of the better camera rigs would probably be something like this: There is a curve (bezier, nurbs, or path) for the generic movement of the camera. Set to follow this curve is an empty, EmptyCCurve. (Or whatever you want to name it). Another empty, EmptyCAim, is set to copy location on EmptyCCuve, and EmptyCAim is also set to track to EmptyCTarget. Empty CTarget is placed wherever you want to aim your camera, generally - it can be freefloating, parented, or set to follow a curve. Finally, your Camera is parented to EmptyCAim.

What's the point of all the complication? It gives us lots of options. If you're simulating shakey-cam, I'd suggest leaving EmptyCTarget free or parented to your ship. If it's free, only put IPO location keys approximately 1-4 seconds apart, and move EmptyCTarget around your subject.
Either method you use, you can then add camera shake in the IPO editor. Select your camera, and add a new pane (or change a pane) to the IPO editor. On the right, you should see some options dLocX, dLocY, dLocZ, and dRotX, dRotY, dRotZ. Select one of these, and you can use CTRL-LMB (CTRL-RMB if you changed it so LMB selects instead of RMB) to draw IPO curves directly. For camera shake especially, you can record mouse movements directly: select two channels (Such as dRotX and dRotY), press CTRL-R, and select an option. In this mode, if you hold down the CTRL button it will record your mouse movements directly. So hold down CTRL and shake your mouse about and you'll get a nice camera shake effect. :)
Remember to use camera shake sparingly! Only using it when an actual cameraman would have trouble keeping the object in frame - such as if the shockwave from a passing jet passes over him, or the action is so fast he has a hard time moving his camera about.


Attaching your jet to a curve will make animation nice and smooth, as well. Just watch out if your curve goes past vertical - blender doesn't know which way is 'up', and if your plane tries to make a loop it will make some very odd spins when it is heading straight up or straight down. Aside from that little kink (which can be compensated for by using more advanced rigs) you'll have a much more believable animation because your camera has to react to the movement of the plane.

Winter:
Psawhn's comments are pretty much spot-on as usual. One thing he hasn't brought up (as far as I can see) is something I noticed in the new video: the Saracen barely moves. In fact, the only time when it's not dead straight in the air is when it's rolling to turn. That's fine in a vacuum, but in atmosphere with things like turbulence and air pressure constantly messing up your flight path in tiny ways, we should see occasional up-and-down shaking of the wings for patches of turbulence and various little course corrections.

I agree with Psawhn about the 3d clouds by the way, they were the best ones, and I hope you manage to get some better shapes out of it.

Regards,
Winter

Destructavator:
Ah!  Okay, with this (meaning all these new comments) I now think I have a much better idea of how to go about putting together better clips.  When I get some time (hopefully within the next few days) I'll see if I can put these to work.

One question - can someone tell me more about what "shakey-cam" is?  That's a term I haven't heard before or don't remember off-hand, although I may know it under a different name.  Is that something like camera jitter (from turbulence)?  Sorry for asking a dumb question - right now it is late at night (where I am, in the U.S.A.).

As for the cloud generator script, it is clunky and difficult to use (takes much trial-and-error), but on the other hand it is free.

And Psawhn, if you're looking for landscape creation, the landscape in the last video I posted a link to was rather quick and easy with the free version of one of several tools I tried out - it exports to Blender as OBJ or DirectX easily, also exports the texture as well, you may want to look into it as soon as I look back and figure out which one it was I used.  (Yes, I forgot, sorry, but I'll post again soon with the name.)  It takes a large number of input parameters and then creates the terrain.

(Sorry, it really is late for me right now, I guess getting tired can dampen the memory and cause brain farts - if I was typing this post any later at night I'd probably be wiping skid marks off the back of my head.)   :P

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