This blog is really taking off...

It seemed appropriate for planes that are in the air to have had a takeoff, which meant working out precisely how each one would do so. 

This process began with the Japanese Planes which had already been seen to come up from the bowels of the Carrier. It was decided that the plane would be seen from engine off to engine on. In order to accomplish this I did some research into a Cessna engine starting up and followed its examples to match the sort of motion that the propeller would partake in. With the propeller motion sorted I played with some extra particle effects just to add some emphasis to the engine starting. I always thought some smoke would be good, and initially with the tubular vents it seemed natural to place smoke there, however with the dragon head motif it just seemed right to place the smoke near the nostril like protrusions and also include a quick burst of flame when the engine begins properly, this was to have a hint of dragon breath.

With the American takeoff I didn’t want too many similarities with the Japanese one, thus I decided to take it part way through the takeoff and thus not show the engine starting up. I also wanted to display the damage the Harbour base had taken and to show the continuing attack by the Japanese, this was why I demolished several of the planes that were originally on the runway whilst also having a trio of Japanese planes perform a brief flyover. 

This flyover did allow me to work out an interesting technique that can be used for this sort of thing. I had used loop before but often when it came to parts just moving in the background I would just move them from A-B and be done with it, in the past this has caused issues as you can sometimes catch a glimpse of the now static objects in the background that was not intended. With a linear loop you can just have the objects continue at a steady pace into the background. This meant the Planes could be setup then just forgotten about, this makes it somewhat simpler when moving cameras to capture alternate angles.

The next step of the takeoff was the surprise, this was always meant to just be an explosion which would send the plane off course, but in the end it became a Japanese Plane crash landing into the front American plane. The second plane then has a nice action takeoff by flying through the explosion.

This explosion was created via a particle superspray, something I hadn’t intended to use. I originally tried a standard fire effect explosion within an atmospheric apparatus, unfortunately when rendered this yielded distinct squares when viewing the other particle effects through the explosion. This explosion went moderately well, and by manipulating the use rate statistic with the autokey I managed to produce an explosion that expands and then fades. The biggest problem with this explosion was the sheer volume of particles present, this ended with a render time that at one point quoted over 16 hours, the worst render time of an individual frame was a little over 5 minutes. Reducing the particle count would have helped but unfortunately it would also make the explosion less impactful. 

Expectedly the particles that came from the crashing Japanese plane went straight through the runway, on some occasion a little bit of particles passing through terrain is acceptable, but in this it looked awful. I thus deployed a deflector in order to stop this occurring. Interestingly this yielded a fantastic result, not only did the particles not go through the floor but owing to the motion of the particles at the time of crash they flew off in the direction the crash would have naturally taken them. 

All in all the scene went well, it was a far cry from the original dramatic takeoff idea of having it spin out and fall off the island, but it worked and made for an action packed scene showing the likely difficulties of taking off whilst being bombarded.

 Video depicting some tests and some reference footage: