Animating F-35 jets in Blender

in recent weeks I've watched multiple videos on Military aircrafts especially on fighter jets that is why I chose it for the topic of my next blender project my idea was to have multiple F-35 jets fly information and then one by one roll into a dive as I did on previous projects I gave myself the challenge of completing this whole idea in just one day to achieve that I could not model the whole play myself so I went online and found this model for free it isn't really detailed enough for close-ups but I could always add details myself if needed in blender I first had to adjust the model to my needs closing all flaps removing the Armature changing the glass Shader and fixing other stuff on the model I then tried animating the plane rolling into a dive this was quite hard for me since I'm not really animating that often [Music] I first tried it with simple keyframes and laid out with a curve [Music] I then went back to the keyframe workflow since it seemed easier to me it was then a matter of playing the animation over and over while adjusting the keyframes in the graph editor [Music] I also tried duplicating the jet and offsetting the animation to see what it might look like with multiple chats to get a feel of the environment I started experimenting with that by trying out different hdris I then loaded in an image of some clouds which I put in the background [Music] initially I had the idea to create some volumetric clouds myself and put them in the foreground and though I quickly realized that I could not get them to look realistic enough also they increased the render time dramatically so I removed them again to have the overall light match the background image more closely instead of using an hdri I created a sphere scaled it way up and used the same image with an emission Shader I also created a big play and it made it darker and placed it underneath the scene outside the camera view this gave me control of how dark the underside of the plane would be a technique I learned from Ian Hubert's latest patreon video as a last step I added a sun lamp and did a test render [Music] I then swapped through some other background images but in the end stayed with the first one [Music] back to the animation this was really the hardest part of this project since I'm not that experienced in it in the end I did not have the plane go into a dive since I could not get it to look realistic enough somewhat okay with animation I duplicated the plane multiple times and offset the animation to create the formation [Music] [Music] the planes look too shiny so I adjusted the roughness map with a color ramp I then duplicated the plane last time removed all animations and placed it where the camera was I wanted the camera to be placed inside the cockpit to get some more space I scaled up the plane a bit [Music] [Music] the inside of the cockpit looked way too dark since by default not enough lights gets through the glass Shader so with some notes I fixed that [Music] I then did another test render as you can see the pilot isn't really meant to be seen that close so I separated him and put him into a new clean scene there I redid the visor [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] I also worked on his breathing tube making it sub D and later adding a displacement map [Music] a lot of details were too low poly so with the battle type set to percent I fixed that also adding some depth of fear to the camera the pilot now looked much more realistic the glass looked too clean for me so I added a grunge map to the roughness map I then also used it to mix in a diffuse Shader adding some black stains as you can see on the render the rest of the cockpit still looks flat and simple so I added some bolts and other random details to make it look more realistic for that I took inspiration from some real-life cockpit [Music] to texture this new geometry I did a quick and dirty unwrap and placed it on the already existing textures since I knew this would be out of focus I just made sure the overall color somewhat matched [Music] thank you [Music] to create energy behind the planes I added heat Distortion to the bag by using a video of pressured steam as bump map for a refraction Shader [Music] [Music] [Music] I then placed it behind all the other planes but making sure to offset the video clip [Music] I then had the idea that the main plane also would roll to the side by that hiding part of the other plane's animation I created an empty and parented all the parts to it then gave it the roll animation [Music] now the background image was not large enough in Photoshop I extended it a bit then blending it with another image [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] I was not too happy with the breathing tube as I removed the displacement map and modeled in the details by hand [Music] to get movement to the pilot I added some bones and parented the mesh to it with automatic weights [Music] thank you now I could bring out my animation skills again [Music] here I heavily relied on the noise modifier to give me some random movement [Music] I then also added some noise to the jet animations to have it look like they are actually flying [Music] with Ian Hubert's camera shakeify add-on I added some easy movement to the camera [Music] as a last step I did an AI upscale of the background image to give it some more resolution and remove the noise 20 hours of rendering later here is the final animation [Music] for just one day of work I'm super happy with the result I haven't done many animations especially not in that short time frame there is some stuff I would adjust if I would develop this idea further for once I have some mesh problems here for example I forgot to shade smooth after adding the camera shake a lot more of the breathing tube was visible than I initially thought so I did not really add enough details far enough down leaving me with this bigger end alter I don't like how the outside is refracted in the upper parts of the glass so I would probably turn down the index of refraction on the glass Shader a bit as a last thing I would work some more on the plain animations currently it looks a bit boring all in all I'm super happy with the result and surprised how much you can actually achieve in just one day

Channel: MLT Studios

Views: 210,015

Keywords:

Id: 2VSd7Ydvw44

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023