Aerodrome Red Baron Animation

[backusstudio]

This really is an exciting project. Imagine being able to recreate all of the major air battles of WW1! A huge undertaking but a fascinating prospect. Thank you for your suggestions. I can see the battles you describe. It's getting me revved up to choose one and get started!

[Beto]

That would be great!! - Please don't hesitate to ask for help if you need it. Tim West made a great 3D model of the triplane, Mark Miller is THE man when dealing with textures and 3d models, and maybe they could lend a hand. I'm a graphic designer and can make textures and some 3d modelling too. Maybe the most difficult task would be making some virtual "fly-through" clouds. The SFX company that made the combat scenes for the red baron movie had their own software for clouds and Vue is a good program for that task, but not so much for animation. I would suggest to put a duplicate of this topic in the art subforum.
This is a great project. Go on, now YOU can make history!!

[ManfredL]

Sounds like a great idea, really. A fan project might be much cooler than the ususal movie scenes.

I am interested in CGI and Air Combat. Sadly I wont be of any help, just staggering through a newbie tutorial about building a N11 in Blender3D but I wont give up until I render some plane like contraption .

I like the setting of the Hawker and Richthofen fight, since you already have a DH2.

But rendering an animation with many frames would surely take ages, wouldn't it?

[Catfish]

Hello,
this is a very good idea, go for it !
I do not know how you want to produce actual combat scenes, but may i propose to have a look at "OFF", or better "Over Flanders Fields".
Gallery
If you did not hear about it yet: This is a Flight simulator with "our" planes, or at least a lot of them, and OFF phase two is actually free - anyone could send you a Dvd, or i would do it (downside is you would also need CFS3 and a fairly good PC to play/watch it in full glory).
Point is that the flight scenes can be easily captured with e.g. Fraps, though there may be better recording stuff, and this could be used for "live" flying scenes. Landscape, front and planes are very detailed, and even will be historically correct in phase 3.
Only an idea, i do not have anything to do with the programming, selling or anything regarding this Sim, but the graphics are unbelievable - speaking of quality the stuff to be seen in history channel is far below this.
Greetings,
Catfish

[CORVUS]

Wooooh, let's pull back on the reins.

Mr. Backus offered to do this for free. It takes many,many hours of tedious time to create animated footage. He's not getting any compensation. Let's give the guy a break. How about a one on one and call it a day. MVR against Hawker. A well documented dogfight.

Lou

[Stefan]

Nice try to see the images of the new programme

[backusstudio]

Originally Posted by Beto

That would be great!! - Please don't hesitate to ask for help if you need it. Tim West made a great 3D model of the triplane, Mark Miller is THE man when dealing with textures and 3d models, and maybe they could lend a hand. I'm a graphic designer and can make textures and some 3d modelling too. Maybe the most difficult task would be making some virtual "fly-through" clouds. The SFX company that made the combat scenes for the red baron movie had their own software for clouds and Vue is a good program for that task, but not so much for animation. I would suggest to put a duplicate of this topic in the art subforum.
This is a great project. Go on, now YOU can make history!!

Thanks Beto. It's so cool to be chatting with you guys from Europe.

The program that I use is called Carrara. It's a Mac based program that does a pretty good job. Most of the quality issues will be up to the modeler/ animator, not the program.

I've seen Mark Miller's 3D work and it's off the hook. An insane amount of detail. If I start something that Mark joins in on that would be fantastic. I don't know how this project will shape up. We may end up with an animation gallery here on the Aerodrome as well (or selling DVDs to help fund the site? Who knows?). The point is to record some of the volumes of knowledge that this forum represents. The professional movie guys have all of the resources for creating amazing animations but they're obviously as dumb as a bag of hammers when it comes to the FACTS of WW1.

My program creates clouds, smoke, flames, atmospheric haze, soft shadows, most of the big boy stuff. I'll no doubt be crying out for help at some point so keep checking back. I'll be posting still models and battle scripts for critique as I progress.

[backusstudio]

Originally Posted by ManfredL

Sounds like a great idea, really. A fan project might be much cooler than the ususal movie scenes.

I am interested in CGI and Air Combat. Sadly I wont be of any help, just staggering through a newbie tutorial about building a N11 in Blender3D but I wont give up until I render some plane like contraption .

I like the setting of the Hawker and Richthofen fight, since you already have a DH2.

But rendering an animation with many frames would surely take ages, wouldn't it?

How much worse can we do than Hollywood in terms of showing what it was really like?

Maybe this will be of help to you initially and then you will be able to contribute later on. There is certainly enough work here for 1,000 modeler/ animators if we had them.

I'm liking the MvR/ Hawker fight as well for a starter. Greg's scene sounds incredible but maybe ambitious for my first.

The animation render time will depend on a lot of things. If we're going for a small internet animation (360x240 or smaller) that will speed things up. I did an HDTV 'fly through' of a motor home that took two weeks to render. Other things like effects also take time. We'll see....

[backusstudio]

Originally Posted by Catfish

Hello,
this is a very good idea, go for it !
I do not know how you want to produce actual combat scenes, but may i propose to have a look at "OFF", or better "Over Flanders Fields".
Gallery
If you did not hear about it yet: This is a Flight simulator with "our" planes, or at least a lot of them, and OFF phase two is actually free - anyone could send you a Dvd, or i would do it (downside is you would also need CFS3 and a fairly good PC to play/watch it in full glory).
Point is that the flight scenes can be easily captured with e.g. Fraps, though there may be better recording stuff, and this could be used for "live" flying scenes. Landscape, front and planes are very detailed, and even will be historically correct in phase 3.
Only an idea, i do not have anything to do with the programming, selling or anything regarding this Sim, but the graphics are unbelievable - speaking of quality the stuff to be seen in history channel is far below this.
Greetings,
Catfish

I had not seen Over Flanders Fields before. Very impressive. This is one of those rare occasions where I wish I had a PC. Hopefully I can get similar results with the equipment that I have.

I like the History Channel Dogfights stuff other than the gimmick of the camera getting 'wind buffeted' every time an aircraft flies past the viewer. It gets old after a while.

Cheers, Catfish!

[TomVrille]

Originally Posted by backusstudio

... I am considering doing a 3D animated short showing von Richthofen in action. ... if I did a 3 minute animation of aerial combat it would equal the combat aviation content of the entire 2 1/2 hour Red Baron movie. ...So I'm putting out feelers to see if there is interest in a project like this. I will do the modeling and animation, your role would be to offer constructive criticism and cheerlead. ...Thanks for your feedback-

I will be happy to cheerlead and offer criticism. You will have to decide how constructive the criticism may be.

I love the idea of modeling the MvR/Hawker engagement, since this engagement is still used today as representative of what is now known as "Close-in-Combat", or CIC. Even the latest short range air-to-air missile development programs use this model because it is necessary to show that missiles have a place in a combat arena that has long been viewed as the exclusive environment of the body-fixed gun!

There is one small problem. The full MvR/Hawker engagement lasted longer than your proposed 3-minute simulation. Unless you intend to model the aircraft as having flight dynamics more appropriate to Star Wars than WW1 , the sim will have to be extended.

That said, Rah Rah Rah, on with the show!!