The Project:

My name: Mike Douma

Project: Animation
Project Title: 2 Planes
Format: QuickTime.




Initial Scene

QuickTime Movie File:
2Planes 4.7Mb

The Story:

Two Canadian F-18 Hornet fighters are flying their next mission.
They come to a small mountain range and increase altitude to clear over it.
As they come across the range, an unknown tank is moving towards them.
As it raises its gun, the planes realize they are in trouble.
The tank fires a shot and hits one of the planes.  The plane falls toward
the ground, but not before the pilot has a chance to eject.
The second plane, however, comes in and fires a missle at the tank, blowing
it to pieces.

The Concept:

After many weeks of thoughts and ideas, I finally came to the decision that I
would produce an animation that contained (at least) a plane in it.  I am a 
fan of combat flight simulation games such as JetFigher III (being my favorite)
and therefore I thought it reasonable to undertake this task.  Of course, the
plane needed something to blow up, and for this reason I included a tank in the
animation as well.

The Process:

With little time to spare, I began to model the plane about a month before the
project was due.  This took me about three nights and altogether about 10-15 hours.
With two weeks left before the project deadline I made some refinements to my 
original plane by adding missiles to it, adding the textures, and adding 
the Canadian Flag decals.  

I created a tank in about 2-3 hours, and had it fully decorated with textures
within about 5 hours.  The next part was developing the scene.

The entire scene was created and stored in a single file.  The mountain range was
created first, and then all the required motion paths.  Initial tests of the motion
paths were done using simple spheres as objects.  Installing the 5 camera views was
a little tricky, but accomplished.  Once this was done, I imported two planes and
a tank into the scene, and gave them their respective motion paths.

Some refinements to the timing of the objects and the cameras was done, and then the
project was rendered and stored into a QuickTime movie format.

Models:

All models used in my animation were created using Alias PowerAnimator 8.5.
They were all designed and drawn myself using two books that I
have, as a reference towards getting a more accurate model.
     *Ref 1. The handbook for Jetfighter III.     (by Mission Studios)
     *Ref 2. The handbook for Armored Fist II.    (by Novalogic)

This was the most time consuming task by far, but when you see a good model
in the animation, it makes the time spent worthwhile.


The models used in the animation include:

• Plane
• Missle
• Tank
• Mountain Range

    
Plane (3 views)

• The plane was designed primarily with the Line, Curve, and Skin functions in Alias. I first designed the outline of the body using a series of circles. I then deformed the circles into the shape I wanted to get, and then ran a "skin" from one circle to the next, all the way down the body.
• The thrusters are simply cylinders set back into the planes body.
• The wings and fins were made by drawing the shape of the wing using line sketch, and then a skin was made interior to those lines. The wings were given a further 3D effect by creating a second wing under the first wing, and then making a rounded skin along the front side of the two wing layers. The back sides of these wing layers were given a flat skin to join them together.
• The plane hatch is also a skin, however it has been given transparent qualities.
• The Canadian Flag decals were first put onto a 2D plane, and then grouped onto the wings of the plane as well as the sides of the plane.
• The missles are cylinders with little fins I drew onto the sides of them.

     
Tank

• The tank too, was designed primarily with the skin function.
• The tires of the tank were made with cylinders - 4 per side. They were then encircled using a cirle which I deformed to fit in an oval shape around the tires.
• The body was made using Line draw, and then skinning the interiors of these lines.
• The top of the tank was also done with line draw. First I drew the top of the tank top. (similar to a hexagon shape) Then I scaled this line drawing up in size to make the bottom outline of the tank top. I then made skins from the top to bottom - to produce the tank top.
• The gun is a cylinder stuck into the tank top.

Mountain Range

• The mountain range was made with a different method. I created a 2D plane and made its control vertices visible. I then inserted appox. 10 more rows of control vertices both horizontally and vertically across the planes' surface. I then selected control vertices and moved them up and down, to create a mountain effect.

Cameras:

There are five cameras used in my animation.
All five of these cameras follow motion paths.


Camera 1:  Follows the two Canadian F-18 Planes until the come to the mountain.
           Runs from frames 1..99.

Camera 2:  On the opposite side of the mountain, camera 2 watches the planes
           as they come over the range and begin to descend.
           Runs from frames 100..167.

Camera 3:  We see the tank moving into position and raising its gun.
           (the gun would actually fire a shot)
           Runs from frames 169..227.

Camera 4:  We see one of the planes falling to the ground.  If you look
           closely, you can see the hatch of the plane opening, but the
           pilot doesn't eject. The camera cuts away before the plane crashes.
           Runs from frames 228..287.

Camera 5:  We see an incoming missle from the second plane blow up the tank,
           and then fly by the scene.
           Runs from frames 288..360.

Textures:

Here you will find the textures that I created and used in my animation.
All of the textures were created using Alias/wavefront StudioPaint 3D 4.0.
The textures were saved as BITMAP files, and exported into Alias PowerAnimator
and assigned to the models.

     The only thing I didn't create was the sky environment 
     which was a selectable item within Alias.

    **There are actually two texture maps missing below.
      - the texture used on the mountain range.
      - the texture used on the body of the tank
      I accidentally deleted them while moving files around.
      Both of these textures were variations of the Camo, and Floor textures
      shown below.





Camo.GIF
This texture was used on the body of the planes.





Flag2.GIF
This texture was used as decals on the two planes.

   The texture was first placed on 2D planes, and then these planes were 
   put on both wings of the planes as well as on both sides of the planes
   under the cockpit.





FalseHill.GIF
This texture was used on the backside of the mountain.

     Explanation:  The mountainside is actually 3D and made with depth and curves.
   When viewing the back of the hill it appeared as a solid black colour even
   though it was given the same colour as the front of the mountain.  This was
   due to the fact that the backside was drawn straight down as opposed to the 
   front side which was given depth and various curves.
   Therefore, I created a 2D plane, placed this texture on it, and placed it
   directly in front of the backside of the mountain to make it seem like the
   backside of the 3D mountain range.  If you look very closely during camera 2's shot,
   you can vaguely see that this texture only extends onto a plane, and not the entire
   mountain surface.  This texture does give a 3D effect which was what I wanted.





TankTread.GIF
This texture was used on the treads of the tank.





Floor.GIF
This texture was used on the floor of the environment.

Lighting:

     There are several lights used in the animation.  They were added mostly
so you could see the mountain colours, as well as the plane and tank colours.

Light 1:  Is set to a motion path and follows the planes in frames 1..99.
          It is an ambient light used to light up the planes.

Light 2:  Is a fixed light and is positioned towards the front of the mountain 
          range. It too is an ambient light.

Light 3:  Is a directional light, placed above the mountain range pointing
          directly at the 2D plane drawn on the backside of this range.
          Without this light, the backside of the mountain range looked black.

Light 4:  Positioned above and towards the tank.  It is an ambient light.
          It allows us to see some of the tanks colours.
          I wanted the tank body to appear darker in colour, and for this reason
          I kept the lighting rather low for this shot.

Conclusion:

     Although this project was a lot of work, it was very rewarding to see
a finished product at its completion. (even though it was only 15 seconds!) 

The project has given me a deeper appreciation for animations that I see on 
the TV, and I feel I have learned something VERY valuable to my future in computers
- regardless of whether or not I will go into a graphics field.
Most of all, this project was kind of fun (even though I'd hate to admit it!)


Mike Douma.

Back to 1999 animations.