Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
The inishing parts of the scene will be about creaing a basic animaion for the ighter to
pass flying close to the storm cloud; we'll also add a simple lightning effect inside the cloud.
What Does It Do?
We will create a short animaion in which a ighter aircrat lies inside a giant storm cloud,
including a simple lightning effect inside the cloud.
Our main tasks will be modeling the aircrat and creaing the giant storm cloud. The modeling
part will require some very detailed work but the final product is going to make it worth the
effort. We'll be applying some basic
topology
concepts to avoid the situaion of having to
reconstruct some parts of the mesh if it doesn't conform well to the desired shape. On the
clouds side, we are going to use the volumetric material available in Blender 2.50, which will
prove how easy it is to create nice looking clouds, even dark ones. Since we require a very
precise shape for the cloud, we are going to use a very useful type of texture available for
volumetric materials, which will require us to set up a fast paricle system to get the ulimate
control we want.
Finally, we are going to put all the objects in a scene and perform a couple of animaion tasks
to get a renderable animaion. For these animaion tasks, we'll be applying a very simple
methodology to keep things nice, clean, and simple.
Why Is It Awesome?
This project will let us get acquainted with some very important things when working in
CG. First of all we'll see how useful and helpful it is to create a good mesh structure when
modeling a certain object, planning ahead the shape it will have in the end. We are also
going to see how easy it can be to set up a nice material using just procedural textures and
standard material seings.
The best part of this project is creaing the storm cloud. This will let us see how powerful
and easy it is to set up the volumetric material available in Blender. When combined with
the technique for shaping the volumetric density using a paricle system, we'll see how much
control we can get for objects of this kind. The best part of it all is that by mixing various
independent tools within Blender our job will be quite easy to accomplish, without having to
compromise on the quality of things.
We'll also learn a simple but efecive approach to create basic animaions, and avoid falling
into an overcomplicated workflow for them. Learning to keep things simple is very important
since that will give us more space to be creaive rather than having to do repeiive tasks
over and over.
