F/A-18 Low Level WIP

[Rotorhead]

Here is a quick low level I did using Terragen Classic and Lightwave using Omar Chaudry's F-18 model from the downloads page. Still a WIP and not sure where I'm going with this, except it's fun to make airplanes fly, and this is my favorite jet..

Bryan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFivC9m0kKk

[Kionel]

Good work.

Couple of things stand out:


At 00:02, the jets lurch downward. The movement is a little too abrupt to be natural. Perhaps you could look at the curves there, and then adjust the tension to make the movement less mechanical.
The ground surface needs a little more attention. Try to break up the surface with different areas of specularity, diffuse, and coloration to make it feel more organic.
I really like the low level ground disturbance. That being said, it feels a little too regular and constrained.
If possible, try and render the elements in passes (sky, ground, planes, dust) and use a package like AE, FX Home to sweeten each element. That will give you loads more control over the way the scene can end up looking.
Like I said, good job. I just wanted to pass on some ideas.

Tony

[Rotorhead]

Good work.

Couple of things stand out:


At 00:02, the jets lurch downward. The movement is a little too abrupt to be natural. Perhaps you could look at the curves there, and then adjust the tension to make the movement less mechanical.
The ground surface needs a little more attention. Try to break up the surface with different areas of specularity, diffuse, and coloration to make it feel more organic.
I really like the low level ground disturbance. That being said, it feels a little too regular and constrained.
If possible, try and render the elements in passes (sky, ground, planes, dust) and use a package like AE, FX Home to sweeten each element. That will give you loads more control over the way the scene can end up looking.
Like I said, good job. I just wanted to pass on some ideas.

Tony

Thanks for the input Tony, I'll take a look at the jets at 00:02, how do I adjust the tension?
I agree the surface needs more attention, however that is a Terragen generated background, how do I break that up if it's possible.
I didn't break everything up on the intial WIP, I broke out the jets, dust, vapors shadows and afterburners, I'm in the process of breaking out the BGR, Diffuse, Spec, RGB and reflection now, I'll post another when I get it composited in combustion

Thanks again,
Bryan.

[Meurig]

Rendering with motion blur will hide a lot of your environment's inadequacies. If you check out how it looks with blur you might find it needs less alteration than you thought. Always a bonus :)

One thing the blur will do though is make everything look much smoother, in which case colour variation of the rock will need to be more contrasted to show up.

[Rotorhead]

Rendering with motion blur will hide a lot of your environment's inadequacies. If you check out how it looks with blur you might find it needs less alteration than you thought. Always a bonus :)

One thing the blur will do though is make everything look much smoother, in which case colour variation of the rock will need to be more contrasted to show up.

Thanks! Any idea how to add a motion blur to a Terragen rendering? I can't find it anywhere in my options for Terragen. I'm animating in LW and using Kevin Phillips LScript for importing camera setting and sun position into Terragen, but can't get the blur?

[Meurig]

Haven't a clue I'm afraid, I don't use terragen.

Out of interest though, why arent you doing it the other way around? Generating your environment geo in terragen and then porting it to LW to animate and render. I gather this is the more usual way of doing things.

[Rotorhead]

The reason I'm not doing it that way is because I get more control over the final product (except for the terrain here) using combustion to composite all the elements together, trying to do it like they do in Hollywood I suppose. I'm probably doing this bass ackwards, but I'm actually going into Terragen and designing my terrain, you can export a LWO of your terrain from there. I have figured out the proper camera settings to match the LWO and Terragen cameras. Once the terrain is in LW, I make my concept fly by, then export the camera angles and sun positions into Terragen using TGExporter, then I render out my background frames. Then I break out all the elements in LW (BGR, RGB, Diff, Spec, Reflection, Exhaust, Vapors, Dust...etc) then combine all the elements in Combustion for the final product.

I'm still new, so if you have a better flow please let me know. I'm also doing this on my home computer, using my old computer as a render node, so I am limited in that regard.

My next version has some added shadows and the jets are banking around a water tower now....we'll see where it goes from there. Thanks for all the input.

[Rotorhead]

Here is the updated video, fixed the mechanical camera movement, changed the F/A-18 models, added motion blur to the Terragen terrain, added a water tower and changed the dust. I'm thinking of trying to add some desert scrub brush and maybe some desert type trees, who knows. Hope you like it, all comments welcome...please let me know what you think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fC8SfOPChg

[BillS]

That is some damn nice camera work

[3D_CG]

interesting...
looks really grand so far...

A few stray Sams, would be cool... :)

Michael