How I reconstructed the SR-71 Blackbird (in-depth research, 3D modelling, animation, and more)

welcome everyone to the behind the scenes video for the SR71 Blackbird I'm your host Jake O'Neal creator of animography since 2021 even though my release schedule is really long the videos themselves are evergreen educational content so they get a lot of views so it's not the same as episodic like podcast weekly style channels but I still make a fair living off of this comp comparable to a Channel of similar size but I don't take sponsorships at least I haven't because they haven't made sense because the content it just seems like it wouldn't be a good fit for this kind of content now another thing I wanted to point out is that yes I I know that I am above average talented in what I do but I would hate to think that that would discourage anyone from doing what they do or even opening up blender just to dabble just to get a cube and put a light source on it and see what it looks like because I personally know the feeling of seeing someone doing something really well and feeling discouraged upon seeing that so please don't do that with my work just allow me to warmly invite you to start exactly where you are and go from there also specifically on this video the behind the scenes videos I want to extend the invitation to comment I'm sort of a crusty old internet user when it comes to this and I didn't comment on YouTube for a lot of years I just wouldn't interact with stuff like this but I read the comments on all my videos but on the behind the scenes videos I read them even more go ahead and comment chat with people bring stuff up be civil I know that's difficult on YouTube the the rage is always boiling just beneath the surface but but I want to invite you to comment on this video and tell me how you feel about the work and and how you feel seeing the behind the scenes and let's just chat let's get in there let's do it as with every project we start with the research so let's have a look uh one of the big questions I kept getting on the video is shouldn't this be classified information and no so all the stuff that I find is what's been Declassified or what's available online the first thing I found in my treasure Trove of PDFs is this expanded flight manual here so yeah this thing starts out with a nice introduction you can already see it's showing you the technical objective camera what that looks like this manual is awesome awesome it goes through all the flight procedures and every system all the equipment what was that yeah that's where go this is where the equipment is located in the bay different nose installed there um so yeah and then as you get down into the original flight manual you can see oh yeah oh I spent much time with this this is the it's every button in the pit so this is one of the things that I found and that got me pretty close with a lot of the systems I end up having to scr up photos from wherever I can find them for example the airframe would be harder to find because no one's going to be taking just photos of the airframe and at the time they were building it those would be classified so that's one thing you just know you're not going to find in a photo but so there's crash photos here but as I look down inside of here right in here I start to see the details I would be looking for and what you're seeing me do right now is what I spend two to three months doing when I make these looking deep into these photos for clues of how something attaches when I need to know it uh you can see here the zigzag pattern at the edge for the composite material there's a lot of detail in this photo that for a researcher you might not otherwise notice how much detail is in this photo there's a picture of the airframe super rare though more crash photos unfortunately but things like the bypass and the suck IND doors the blow doors at the back those things are hard to see in just a blueprint photo so oh this is I'm just I see this and my eyes just light up because I know what I couldn't find and what I'd be looking for ah so good the airframe has corrugations in it you can see here so not only does the outside have these zigzags to stretch but the airf frame is made to stretch too everything stretches several inches when at speed it's incredible this thing is more organic than it would let on to be I'll just look at a few of these just to give you an idea of what I go through when I'm making these here's the cockpits all of my folders there yeah these are oh man glorious yeah the stick from YouTube videos I if I need detail there take screenshots from YouTube videos one of the things that sort of Saved parts of this project I found something called the SR71 handbook as an ebook that I bought from Google this book right here saved my bacon on some of the parts of this plane because the flight manual has a lot of stuff but it doesn't have some of the under the skin equipment and that is what this book had a ton of so let's look at a few pages here oh yeah look at that every single part of the airframe numbered pieces that's huge and the Nel the composits this is really great showing where those are located this is the SR 71b so the instructional model of the airplane they would have an instructor sit in the rear cockpit and you can see it's got a separate windshield back there so that's pretty cool a different version of the plane I I know a lot more than can even share in the hourong video because of what I have to do to get to know the plane to the degree that I can explain it and simplify it I have to have the big picture so I know a lot of details I've been through every page of these PDFs for sure down to every detail there's the rack for the ejection seat oh so cool the seat itself which was just awesome every part of these planes is amazing so deep detailed so thought about and then we're getting into the j58 jet engines the images I had for this were kind of crusty let me show you the drawings were like photocopies of photoc copies and they're not the best quality this is from a different engine it's just a for an example of the After Burner Exhaust nozzle so if I can't find the exact one in the detail I need I have to start start borrowing parts from relevant engines of the era I always have to do that so these are different engines of the era j52 I'm just trying to find like the shape of the compressor Inlet the ports here and the burner cans the placement cuz I couldn't find as you can see the the images I could get of the j58 were often really crusty even this for as good as it looks is still garbled I think in here I was trying to find the inlet at the fourth stage of the compressor section for the um bypass tubes and there you can see it the gearbox internals the internals of the compressor discs this is from a Volvo engine but it has a lot of the components that that old engine would have so anyway back to the handbook the throttles this is the fuel system super helpful check this out it's got leakage zones so they had they like I said in the video they had charts for how much drips per hour a Zone could have and when those drips were exceeded they would take the plane in and reseal those parts or maybe the whole thing I'm not sure but yeah they have leakage zones for maintenance Personnel absolutely awesome this is an image of the flight control surfaces check this out the wheels underneath the flight stick it didn't really make sense to model all this detail at 55 minutes the video is already really long but just look at how beautiful that is how much thought goes into just this part of the plane these are wheels with tensioners for the cables and they come off the stick it's just glorious if you could see just this sitting in a museum just the stick with those wheels and watch it move it'd be beautiful to behold for sure the actuators and the mixer these photos right here made that mixer section possible now when I saw these I thought that I was just going to hard model that but make it be static it wouldn't be moving when I saw these photos I was so excited because there was just no way I was going to understand that all that I had let me show you what I had just as photos there's one of the photos I have like two there's another photo there from a YouTube video from Azu this will show me a view that these drawings don't show and I see a little tiny part way down in there that I can use I mean I use everything I can find it looks like I was trying to figure it out so the placement of things this is rotated so if you look at the drawing here it's rotated a different way so my mind gets all twisted up and I have to like draw diagrams on these just to understand what view I'm looking at I'm willing to bet that no one has seen that thing in action since it was designed the maintenance Personnel maybe but I was so excited to reveal that to the world and to the community of the people who worked in the SR71 program I'm still connected to some of those folks who were Consultants on the project and they said that that this project is just Rippling through that Community which I think is so cool like I'm just a 3D artist and I I was originally a graphic designer so I'm kind of a nobody when it comes to this stuff and having this work make an impact on the people who actually flew the plane uh my contact said that they were calling each other up and just talking about the plane again after not having spoken in a long time and he said that he was just getting feedback from all different places uh of people in the program who saw the video so that feels pretty amazing to be part of that so anyway it goes on this handbook is awesome there's one of the batteries I didn't model those or I just made a really simple representation this is from a different plane that was like a predecessor to the SR71 I believe cuz it didn't have that kind of radar in the nose the radar jammer here's a picture of the nose a cross-section of the nose detached look at that that's amazing uh here's the elint or radar recording some of the these things are still classified especially the defensive systems the panel in the RSO section in the cockpit was not in any of the books and some of this equipment as well is still classified and this is where I got my visual for the equipment at the end of the video it looks exactly like this cuz this is just a really good source so the radar recording the technical objective cameras what they can see um signal collection and the objective bar camera the Pito Mast once I have these these images and drawings I'll be assembling a huge research stock so these are excerpts and Snippets from sites and forums and their stories transcripts from YouTube videos everything goes in here this is probably 20 to 30 pages yeah just learning how the thing works right I have to learn how everything works to do anything to model it to animate it to describe it everything with all these things assembled the research then I move into modeling the actual plane I do purchase the exterior of these planes with the paint job on it this model did have a nice quality to it so I kept that often times they'll be exported from CAD style software so they're not ready for a mesh style modeler like this is where it's based on a it's based on a like a net of points that you use to define just the exterior of the object something that I do with every body shape like if it was a car or an airplane I have to build blanks of the object that I can use to weld the points to so they don't get out of alignment when I'm cutting holes in the mesh um let me show you what I mean because this is something that beginning 3D artists are guaranteed to mess up the first time they attempt to do a curvy like organic shape that is still a hard surface let me open an example of a model that has all these mistakes in it before we get into this I want to point out that this is not to tear someone down it's constructive learning that we can all do together but this model is an example of sort of an amateurish approach you can see that as we get close to this and I've turned on like a shiny viewport style so that you can really see the problems with this model it looks like a helium balloon that has deflated some so there's not enough air in it so that it starts to wrinkle look at that it's way it looks like the car was in a wreck or something and they tried to straighten it out every surface on this car is like that so the Integrity of this curve as you go down the body line that curve should be a simple swoosh and it looks like it started out that way but then as you're mesh modeling something like this you start to invalidate the basic curves of the mesh for example this door handle you can see is really sunken in and you you can see like all these problems around it if I delete the door handle cutout and connect some of these again look at this just that look at this curve now right there see that that doesn't look so bad that's a nice curve right but what happens is then when they need to cut the hole in for the door handle they scale that down so this was probably bigger like that and when you scale it down you don't realize that what you've done is all also moved it in on the x axis this is now pushed inwards so then you have this problem you're like well I need to scale it down to cut the door handle but if I move any of these points they get off axis on this insanely complex curve that's here okay these are the blank objects that I built for the SR71 this blank is simplified so I reweld the doors in close off the gaps and attach the points what I'm trying to do here is preserve the curvature of all of these areas let me put the shiny viewport on so we can look at that look at how nice look at how nice the curves are you don't want to mess that up you need that to stay exactly how it is it's beautiful even though it looks like a cylinder it's really not there's a lot going on here these curvatures here need to stay how they are what this allows me to do when I need to cut out holes like these holes here let me make it shiny again as I scroll past this and make the Highlight scroll on it look how perfect that is what I've done is shrink wrap you add a shrink wrap here and the target would be the blank so the shrink wrap modifier tells this that no matter what I cut in here it needs to stick to that blank one of these holes you can see that if I lift this up really high or something or mess with it it doesn't move if I turn off the shrink wrapping watch this see the mesh is actually already messed up from the curvature it needs to keep but if I turn the shrink wrapping on it makes it way harder to mess this up I can scale this down or scale it up and it maintains it sticks itself to that blank so when you're cutting holes in things especially things like the door gaps the automotive industry is very particular about door gaps if they look all off and they don't look like they maintain a consistent Gap the human eye will we will notice that so when you're cutting gaps you shrink wrap these to the blank and then when you have to cut out something like a hatch or the cockpit it still sticks itself to that blank when beginning modeling I have to load in all of my images that I find and this is a huge mess let's see oh man there's the top see if I can find the side yeah this came from the yf2 it's got missiles in it but it doesn't matter it'll help me get there I load all the reference images into blender so that I can see what this thing looks like as I'm modeling and I load everything I can find one drawing might not show these ports here and another one does so I just have to take them all together crosssections going back I have images for the fuel system from the top down and the side oh yeah yep I modeled all these pipes in the fuel system even though I didn't say anything about it in the video the cockpit I guess I was modeling the stick there here's the whole thing after a couple of months of work I get this there you have it there's the wireframe for everything I built pretty cool man it makes me want to like incorporate this effect into a video oh that's cool yeah so here's everything I spent all that time building the Man Standing on the wing people ask why I had that guy standing on the wing I find that it brings people into the video if they can see how big things are and what they would feel like standing there and I made sure that you can actually walk on that part of the wing that is a place where maintenance Personnel can walk I was able to find a model of the cockpit all the gauges were wrong or they were just repeated or lazily put in there no one ever needs the kind of accuracy I need to make this work so they'll say it's a model of the cockpit and I'll spend a 100 bucks 200 bucks or something to buy this quality model right and when I get in there nothing is right cuz no one needs the kind of specificity I need so with modeling that's when I start to make my materials too you unwrap these objects like gift wrapping so that you can apply flat image textures to it I got a lot of these gauges from photos online or from the manuals Photoshop is what I use to cut out images and to clean them up like in the face heat for example you can see there's it's kind of messy because I'm flying through these just trying to do this insane workload I don't always have time to clean it all up so I don't yeah I'm I I'm a perfection but only to a point and then I just let it go it's got to get done you know so these are from photos but these ones that I had to redraw I do that in illustrator because that's a better program for making shapes little objects and text thingies so these are all the things that I had to redraw and these are the ones that I could cut out of photos another really cool thing for this video was the opening shot the world texture at 880,000 FT I looked at a bunch of photos to make sure this looks right because it really bothers me in three modeling when things look fake I'm not talking about the illustration style I don't care if it doesn't have like dust and that kind of cinematic realism but I don't like it when the shape of things looks inaccurate so I would also want this view above the Earth to feel right to feel like the photos I saw when they were at 80,000 ft one of the things that commenters notice is that the Horizon is perfectly flat that's just a limitation of environment Textures in blender I thought it was funny that I caught the attention of the flat earthers out there I didn't mean to uh I'm not advocating for anything here I just couldn't make that curved downwards and have the view rotate like this it's not possible to do that and have it be at the Horizon in the software this material for the world texture I also made myself uh because it had to be high resolution back in Photoshop it's just a huge huge image file um the clouds came from NASA I believe a NASA a cloud satellite imagery and the land underneath that is just a repeated thing that I found from another satellite image cuz it didn't need to be specific and then I put the Horizon gradient and a little stars I think I must have okay let me turn those on there you go and a little stars in here I made those this shot with the music and everything playing oh I just wanted I think I really captured how I wanted that to feel just the the feeling of floating there in the silence above the Earth you know that in the beginning end so that material is cool and then you apply that in blender to the world so I have set up a slider in my animation window so that I can fade out this scene if I run this up you can see it fades to that gray sort of more it's better for demonstration purposes so I have a little animation control that I made here the materials are what make things look like what they are so if it's metallic or rubbery plasticky whatever the item should look and feel like but materials also handle transparency and blender has these folders on the side here called collections that organize your file for you but I've made it so that in the animation window these folders are linked to sliders that can make that entire folder transparent and that's that's how I fade things in and out with so much control that system is not native to blender that's something I had to learn how to code to write my own tools for handling that so the exterior in this shot sort of semi-transparent and as I move this slider it brings the entire exterior up every object in that folder materials are also how I handle all gaseous materials or liquids anything that should fill a volume I don't simulate things I fake everything it looks like how it should look to the viewer but inside a blender I'm not simulating water filling a vessel or anything like that it's far too processor intensive and takes too much time to pull off so the exhaust shocks here let me go to the shading window and show you the base texture is an image just like a noisy looks like some standard noise you might find in Photoshop or something and in 3D software you unwrap your objects and lay them flat in the UV editing window you can see if I click on any of these going around it's just laid flat and what that enables is to pass a flat texture along any object in blender and to tell it how how you want it to travel down an object so that's how I do everything so in the shading window if I animate a few frames yeah it's a little choppy because there's so much showing on the screen but the image is just moving along the mesh points and then I process that image as it goes through these nodes there's a gradient for the coloration layer weight provides shading based on the camera angle of view so I can make round things look like they're transparent at the sides h among other things in the end after processing through all these nodes this is the result but it's not real fire or rocket flames it's all built with simple techniques old school techniques this is how PlayStation one does it same Bas same basic concept so I don't often move the mesh I'm move the material through the mesh however sometimes I do both because some effects that I want to achieve require me to move both the mesh and the material in the case of the demo for the aerodynamics I have a background that is just dots in my shading window if I solo these nodes before they get processed into transparency these are the subsonic dots and and I've labeled this collection of nodes as such and then I have the supersonic area of dots there we go this node combines those two materials together as I roll up this Shockwave slider it brings in that zone and I wanted to intensify the effect so I added another 3D object into the mix the background is just that flat plane right here yeah and I added another 3D object into the mix let me show you what this one does this is what it looks like I'll animate a little bit this is what it looks like in the 3D software I'm actually deforming the mesh a little bit to show the turbulence as I roll up the shock wave formation it becomes smooth and turns into that Arrow shape there you go you can see it really well the material changes as the mesh animates like that this is the material when it's forming and this dense dot pattern is the material when it's formed and then I allow this slider to drive the the node that brings up the denser dots as I slide it over yeah so that's an an example of where I've used both material manipulation and manipulating the mesh itself I also used a combination of mesh manipulation and material manipulation for the shock waves so that's the turbulent air as I animate a few frames you can see the image looks like that on the mesh and this is the smooth air and then in this little node which would mix these two materials this slider affects that value as I move it in it fades in that's awesome the faster air over the top of it and then of course again the mock angle changes the size of these cones once I've built all the materials and the model then I move on to rigging which is how you link up and build the moving mechanical objects these are all the 3D objects for the mixer and I definitely wasn't purchasing this this doesn't exist anywhere in 3D form except for here look at that as I was saying when we were looking at the research phase I only had a couple of photos of the mixer from a couple angles and then I found these drawings in these particular drawings in that SR71 handbook but even then I wasn't sure that I was going to be able to animate it I thought I might just model it as best I could and then say you know this thing Blends the flight inputs but not show it moving building this in 3D helped me sort through the puzzle and made it really clear how these things move and how they're connected even in the software looking at this now it doesn't look like anything it's just a complex mess of parts I start to zoom in and and find out where the part go and what they connect to but as long as I'm patient with it and hang with it and stick with it for days at a time I can eventually piece this all out there is a part in the very back right here that is connected to the to the pitch system that I didn't include because I could never find what it should look like but the fundamental function is still there to make them link up and move how they should you use armatures this is my Armature for the mixer and armatures have bones the Bones have properties I can apply to them to tell them to link together and move as a chain or rotate a certain way together and that's how you get your complex movements what I've also done to make things easier for me as I'm doing these projects if I roll up or down the roll quadrant all of the bones that I have created are linked to this one slider so when I'm animating this and playing Mr director I don't have to think about how this thing should animate which would cause my brain to just lock up when I get to animating and the camera moves this needs to be easy for me to understand so I don't have to think about that part of the project anymore so the bones for the pitch quadrant as well and watch this let me solo just the Armature there's the pitch quadrant and the roll quadrant it looks awesome as just the bones I also had to be able to add in the trim system so I move the roll trim and then I can move the roll quadrant yeah and the roll trim adds the adjustment on top of that in the system I can also change the bones so they display as sticks instead of those other shapes so that it's easier to see what's underneath them there's the pitch again and roll and I also used materials again to colorize these systems and I have a slider for that so if I roll that slider up or down it'll colorize these parts and I made it so I could isolate the cables and where they attach to the wheels so that as I'm animating through here later all of that is handled by these sliders on the side of the animation window and it makes it easier for me to come in and get the result I want when I'm directing the final video check this out blender has function so that I can mirror these things side to side so I only had to build one side of this front gear should have something similar yeah and the doors come open Neato I still built the work look at that the shock comes out oh it goes It goes in to simulate the weight of the plane yeah cuz otherwise it wouldn't be at the right ride height when it's sitting on the ground yeah so everything that moves on the plane the flight control surfaces anything that has to shift or move or rotate the jet engine has a bunch of stuff in it is a combination of all these things the materials the objects and the armatures the next thing I have to do is animation and that's the directorial side where I'm flying the camera around the airplane here is the representation of the ca camera in the 3D World and as I push play on the timeline there it goes if I go inside the camera that's how I can see what it's looking at right here is the target to tell the camera where it's looking so if you look at the Timeline here there are 96,000 frames in this animation these are all my camera shots right here I look at the camera go around as I roll this this up all of those things I have to animate everywhere the camera lands this is my script and every single paragraph I put a section number on it a decimal and I think there's something like 230 sections from the audio software I name these files with their corresponding section here and bring those into blender with markers I can hear what I'm talking about as I'm animating things in and out with the camera once it's animated once I have all these camer shots then I move on to rendering so every single frame in this project is a single image I also want to shout out to someone I did it behind the scenes for the steam engine and I was using an old image format and they suggested this image format which is sort of specific to visual artists and it ended up saving me a ton of time and a bunch of file size this format is incredible for working with I don't know why I didn't know about it it really changed the course of this project so let's click into one of these yeah just at the and as I Arrow key left or right each of these is a separate image at 2K resolution once it's done rendering and this will take me about a week and I just render it at night so I'll animate during the day and then render those frames at night and I do 10,000 a day frames the last thing I have to do is the labels and I showed this in my last behind the scenes video cuz I think it's awesome what you're seeing here is the lines that connect in the camera you can see it's a mess but you can see this is every single label in the project that appears on screen for distances or calling out Parts those are welded to the camera so when I move the camera around that little text label they stick with it every single line that goes from a label to the plane is real and in 3D space if I move the camera around you can see they remain connected that's every single label in the project if I look in my label document looks like there's 203 labels to place which is also really time consuming I've coded a bunch of tools in my animography will follow the animation timeline so turn things on and off as I jump through the different labels so that I know what I'm looking at when I need to place them so this is that measurement and if I go to the next label there's the Nel and so this entire system is something I wrote into blender for making anagraph elevons I handled many a project without this and it would take me half a week to do it where now I can do it in a day so that is pretty much everything that goes into the 3D side of the project the visual side but in this behind the scenes video I also wanted to take a just a a look at the music that I composed for this project as well so here we are on my SoundCloud page if you haven't seen it check it out I got the link in the original video description yeah so I wanted this to sound if you've seen that first first man they had the sound of old school synthesizers in there and I wanted this to feel like that the 1960s 7s early synthesizer and I feel like it gives you that spaciousness just that unbelievable feeling of being above it all the as you can see from the my little thumbnail here I wanted it to feel just like the Horizon looks if that makes sense it's very artsy thing to say but the horizon line from such a Viewpoint and even like early in the morning I wanted the music music to feel like that looks to me when I see that when I'm up early camping or something and you see just that Early Sunrise yeah with a heartbeat I put that in a lot of my music not because not because I always want it to sound the same but because I'm applying these soundtracks to the concepts I cover which are usually some intense engineering thing the train the steam train music was quite a bit different than this but there's the the intro that feeling you know you're on a mission but it's wondrous and unbelievable you can't believe what you're seeing so there's the intro theme and I think I finally figured out how to make music work in my videos because I fade this down slowly so that in the center of this 55 minute long experience this section in the middle is a lot quieter in the on the SoundCloud you can hear the original levels but in the video I make it really quiet in the center cuz it fatigues you if I don't turn it down but in the beginning I really can make it loud and I want to grab people and that seems to work yeah so cool and then in this in the middle here and at the end I wanted it to sound like Top Gun like I wanted to bring back that awesome 1980s heroic feel to jets in general so yeah when I do the outro on the video I looked at the most replayed they have a graph down near the play button you can search for the most replayed parts of the video and people are watching the intro and the outro at the end which I love to see that because I wanted to make them memorable the music and the view together I wanted to make it really special it didn't have to be related to the engineering subject at that point I wanted it to feel really cinematic and just artsy kind of so yeah the way that the way things felt as a kid jets in the 80s when I was born these things were just Larger than Life so that's what these themes are meant to [Music] do so that's how I build anagraph

Channel: Animagraffs

Views: 100,474

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Id: hP7CDg0id4I

Length: 39min 33sec (2373 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024