When I received the Carrier design from Jamal I thought
immediately it would be interesting to explore the notion of capturing them
rising out of the clouds and having the cloud vapour be present when it rises
up and out of the cloud layer below. My first thought when trying to create
this idea was a particle system, but the big issue with that would be that the
particles wouldn’t pass around and over the craft it would just pass straight through.
I managed to rig up a system of multiple deflectors which would interact with
the particles simulating them rolling off of the ship’s nose and wings. The
particles themselves were given a material much like the fire tutorial once
more but in a very light grey/white in order to appear like clouds. As a
further attempt to make it look as real as possible I placed some Wind forces
in the scene and had these act on the particles after they had collided with
the deflectors. This all combined to give a nice stream flowing off of the
ships exterior.
Whilst creating this scene I came across the issue of
running out of particles able to be shown on the screen at any time. At this
stage however I was unaware of the limits to one particle source and therefore
ended up just using trial and error to find an appropriate statistic which
would give the highest flow without the particles disappearing too early.
Another unfortunate, but in the end magnificent, problem I
had whilst working on the cloud stream particle effect was that I didn’t have
access to the planes. This led me to conclude that a good idea would be to hide
that fact. In order to hide the lack of planes and still be able to get the
scene finished I manipulated the Carrier by extruding the original runway into
the body of the ship and creating a new one which could be moved up and down as
desired. I then set about adding a new pair of massive doors that would sit
above the runway, colouring these doors with the material used for the main
bulk of the Carrier meant they blended well with the rest of the ship.
Once I had finished the initial appearance of the Carriers I
set about making a reveal of the planes within. I chose to take a slow pan
along the side of the ship as it seemed appropriate to show off the detailing
placed within the modelling of the Carrier. I do tend to find my shots end up
being slightly influenced by how much detail the models have, as I always like
to display the models to their fullest wherever possible. I also fired off the
cannons, primarily just because they were there and it seemed pointless passing
the cannons without them doing anything. I did however think up a little
justification for the act afterwards. The firing of the cannons from the lead
Carrier could be seen as a sign to the others that the attack is about to be a go
and thus readying their aircraft is a process required.
After passing by the cannons, the engines were focused on.
Originally I tried to get the camera to head down from the wing and then swoop
back up and through the engine, unfortunately this merely equated to making a
viewer feel queasy, as the motion was quite jarring and no amount of tweaking
managed to get it smooth.
With the engine passed I wanted something dramatic(ish) to
have the camera shoot back to the front of the Carrier to finally perform the
plane reveal. Initially I went for a patch of smoke racing along the door line,
meant to represent an escaping gas. Regrettably this didn’t look quite right, I
wasn’t overly enamoured with it from the outset but when it was questioned
(“What is that?”) I came to the conclusion that it didn’t look like an escape
of gas it just looked like a strange clump racing along the ship. I ended up
adjusting it so that the entire line of the door released some gas. This proved
to eventually look better, but I came across the particle issue again. On this
occasion I looked it up and discovered reference to a limit placed on the
amount of particles when dealing with Particle emitters. This meant once more I
had to adjust the number through trial and error in order to get the perfect
amount for the appropriate time. I also duplicated the particle emitter to
bolster the amount of particles in order to make it look better.
For the dramatic opening of the doors I keyed them to create
the motion and then added a row of atmospheric apparatus with a smoke coloured
explosion within them. With all of these going off at once and then having them
rise above as the doors open, it provided a nice gas escape which added to the
excitement of the simple door opening.
When attempting to render the pair of these scenes I found
the standard lights were not enough to light the entire orb which made up the
background. This made me want to add my own lights in order to have control
over how much light was in the scene. I remembered from the tutorial I viewed
to create the rolled map the idea of a pyramid array of omni-lights and
therefore decided I would attempt such a thing. It seemed to work in a way but
didn’t feel quite right to end up with quite so many lights in a scene. I feel
my goal for future projects is certainly to research lights and how best to
light a scene, as my current methods seem overkill with the sheer volume of
lights that end up in the scene.
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