How I made this plane crash in Blender

I started off by collecting some reference images from art station and Google Images just to get an idea of what kind of look I was going for I ended up taking quite a bit of inspiration from the forest level in The Last of Us too I really like the combination of fog wet Ferns and Tall Trees here I also gathered a couple of images of crash planes just to give some reference as to how the different materials were supposed to break apart then I got to work creating a bunch of pine trees using blender's sapling add-on I think this was my second time using this atom but to be honest it's a little bit confusing luckily there are some presets that got me close enough to what I was looking for and then I could just tweak some of these settings here I thought about using the animation option but then I realized that this project was quite ambitious as is and I didn't want to complicate it more than I had to I gave the trees some leaves and then mapped this Pine Branch texture I stole from Google onto the leaves I found this really nice bark texture from polyhaven downloaded that sucker and slapped it down my three models at this point I was pretty happy with how the trees were looking so I moved on to blocking out the scene a little bit I added in a subdivided plane and used the sculpting tab to start forming some terrain I knew that I was going to be more or less covered by vegetation so I didn't bother putting too much effort into this I used some rough texture painting to have these elevated Parts be a Mossy Rock texture and the ground ba with the muddy texture then I gave the ground plane a hair particle system and set it to render as a collection then I selected my trees collection and boom we have some trees last time I checked trees were supposed to go up and not sideways so I rotated all my trees 90 degrees on the x-axis then hit apply rotation I don't know why blender does this to us but this is the best workaround I know of then I set the orientation axis to object set and gave it a slight amount of rotation Randomness and a lot of face Randomness this will make it more difficult to tell that it's instancing the same trees over and over again after adding in some ferns that I got from sketchfab it was starting to look pretty solid I decided between using a large military aircraft a fighter jet or a small private airplane and in the end I chose the small private airplane this made it feel a little bit like this would be a cut scene from Uncharted or something and if you haven't guessed by now I'm a big fan of nautical games I got some dirt textures from Google and overlaid them on top of the model so I could switch the damaged textures on once it hit the ground to get this cracked glass effect I plugged this texture into the ior OR index of refraction value of my glass Shader which kind of mimics how light reflects differently through the cracks then I started preparing the destruction simulation for the plane and this small tree if you want to see a step-by-step tutorial on how I do this you can check out my plane crash tutorial the basic idea is to create a rough estimation of the mesh using the remesh modifier then fracture this object using cell fracture then I fractured the real mesh using the X explode modifier and apparented those pieces to the cell fractured Parts using this simple script then just to optimize the scene a little bit and make it easier to work with I run this script to join all of the pieces that are parented to the same simulated object into one object if you're wondering how I made this script I didn't you might have heard of this little indie project called chat DBT turns out it knows python to be completely transparent though it takes quite a bit of hand holding in order to get it to write anything usable but it does mean that I don't have to worry about learning python which sounds like a fair deal to me I gave the airplane a bit of initial velocity and began trying to find a simulation that I was happy with it took quite a bit of tweaking and it wouldn't surprise me if I ran it like 50 times or more before I got something I was happy with luckily it wasn't all that heavy to bake so I could afford to run it over and over again without wasting hours of my time to sell the interaction between the airplane and the ground I decided to use Dynamic paint to deform from the ground a little bit I also use Dynamic paint to get a Vertex weight group of where the airplane was touching the ground and then I used that vertex group in a mask modifier to mask out everything else then I gave this plane a particle system and choose use modifier stack and boom we have the breeze where the airplane touches the ground I had to keyframe the velocity of the particles to have it match the movement of the airplane and then I gave the deformed ground a collision modifier to have the particles stick to it I thought it would be cool to have the vegetation and scene react to the airplane pieces as they moved through it so I joined some of these ferns into one object and then used the remesh modifier to get a low poly mesh that would kind of wrap around the original High poly mesh then I gave that low polymesh a cloth simulation and pinned the bottom vertices so it wouldn't just fall through the ground I gave the airplane pieces Collision modifiers and as I play the animation you can see how the low poly mesh forms pretty nicely as the airplane moves through it I then used a surface deform modifier on the high polyferns and selected the low polycloth object as a Target this makes the high poly mesh get the same movement as the cloth simulation and except for some glitches here and there I think it worked out great this actually turned out to be one of my favorite parts of this scene and I'm thinking about making an entire video about how you can use this method in different ways I thought about using rigid body destruction on the ground here but that was just way too heavy on my computer at this point and it wasn't even looking that good so I scrapped that idea notice how the edges here look almost like cloth I experimented with giving some of the pieces cloth simulations and then pinning everything except for the edge this created the illusion of the destruction being more detailed than it actually is and gave some depth to the simulation I'm definitely gonna use this method more often for now so simple but it really sells the effect kind of reminds me of on people do character animation and add secondary motion to their characters it's really awesome how a little extra effort here can Elevate the entire animation at this point the scene was looking pretty good but it lacked some of that hazy atmosphere that I was going for so I decided to add a big Cube that covered the entire scene and gave it a volumetric material with very low density I just love the depth and atmosphere this brings to the scene but unfortunately it's quite heavy to render in the end I think I rendered it at 32 samples per frame I know and except for some tiny flickering the denoiser handle it very well nowadays I always render my animations to PNG sequences instead of any of the movie formats because this allows me to keep an eye on how the frames are turning out as I render as well as pause the rendering and keep going at a later point if I have to once I had my 300 frames ready to go I imported them as an image sequence into my editor and gave it some simple color grading a bit of Leinster and some chromatic aberration around the edges here all this could definitely be done inside of blender but I find that compositing and video editing isn't really blender's strong side so I prefer to get my render out of blender and into a more traditional editing program such as after effects or in this case an old version of hitfilm okay so a couple of things that you guys pointed out the speed and the angle of the airplane is a little bit weird as Hammer of Davey here says this kind of airplane should be going Max 50 miles per hour in a situation like this um so yeah we could work on the physics here a little bit I think the particles could have benefited from being a little bit smaller here and it's a little bit weird how the wing survives hitting the tree but then breaking apart spontaneously as the plane hits the ground but all this aside I'm pretty happy with how it turned out in the end I want to give a big thanks to the 20 200 of you who decided to subscribe to my channel here I've got plans for some pretty cool videos coming up very soon so hopefully it will be worth your time thank you for watching and see you in the next one [Music] foreign

Channel: FxForge

Views: 176,227

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Id: kiJrjKiQqSw

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023