[Becco_UK]

A medium detailed Le Rhône engine is made. For now, some basic Maxwell materials are being used which will be modified at the texturing stage.

[Becco_UK]

The engine in place. I'm thinking of making a low resolution engine for any 'in flight' images because all the detail is not required when motion blur is applied to the engine and airscrew.

[Maximus3D]

This is looking real good Becco, the engine is great! and when you dropped it in your aircraft it made it complete. that engine looks like it's highly detailed but you say it's only medium, what details have you skipped ?! i mean when you even have screws on it

I assume you're still gonna cover the main body and the rest of the plane with cloth so it can fly.

Only one thing bothers me and it's that you barely get any comments and feedback at all and this is still one of the most interesting wip threads on the forum now i think that's bad style.

/ Max

[Bubbaloo]

I am watching and impressed, as I'm sure lots of others are, but there's really nothing to critique so far.

[Becco_UK]

Maximus3D: Thank you. I'm classing the engine as medium because in a bid to conserve polygons some detail as been omitted - the most noticabe being the crankcase which with the real thing has more shapes instead of my basic cylinder! The fusealge is to be covered and I've tried different way of doing this involving Cinemas' cloth engine.

Bubbaloo: Thank you too.

The fuselage covering gets started! I was hoping to stretch some cloth over this part but the result didn't turn out as I hoped - there were problems getting an accurate radius around the framework. So 'plan b' went into action and I made a simple fuselage cover using some splines. The plywood side peices were then used to push out the cloth. With the corners 'pinned' the cloth stretched out much better requiring only a bit of smoothing using Cinemas' mesh brush.

[Becco_UK]

I used a similar process as used with the earlier axle fairing part to define the fuselage structure a little. It's only really noticable at certain viewing angles. The tailplane was also made with Cinema's cloth engine but still needs some adjusment. The rudder is to be replaced with a better part.

[Becco_UK]

A simple preview render to look at the fuselage from a different angle. Used this test to try out some motion blur on the airscrew. Didn't bother rotating the engine for this test which was only used to get a 'feel' for how much rotation to apply for a future static image. Maxwell's motion blur works very well except when it comes to rotational motion blur and some compromise has to be made with how much movement is defined. Motion blurred shadows help to compensate up for that shortcoming though.

[Becco_UK]

Not had much time to add much to the Fokker during the past few days. I was hoping to have started the texturing over the weekend too. Instead, just some tidying up of the wing struts and added the wing fixing brackets.

I used this test render to try out a sky backdrop image converted to a Maxwell .mxi.

[Becco_UK]

Decided to have a break from the Fokkers' main structure and start on the pilot. To generate the basic mesh I will be using the free Make Human 0.9.0 software from http://www.makehuman.org/blog/index.php .

This software is ideal for generating 3D humans quickly for further work in other software.

[Becco_UK]

This is what Make Human outputs without too much effort. A little 'rough around the edges' but the speed of making that mesh more than compensates and much better than I could have modelled.

[Becco_UK]

For this Fokker pilot I've decided to only make the only the upper half so in Cinema 4D the mesh that wasn't required got deleted. Eyes, gums, and teeth are split from the main mesh and are now seperate objects for use later on.

[Becco_UK]

The 'pilot' mesh placed inside a HyperNurbs object which in turn is placed in a symmetry object. Now the clothing can get underway.

[NicoR44]

Woow cool, thanks for the link Becco!! just what I need for my Fiat 500L!

[Becco_UK]

NicoR44: If you are not rigging the Fiat driver then the figure can be posed in Make Human and exported in that posed position. You can save body settings but any poses applied do not get saved in Make Human. So could be easier to rig and pose the figure within your usual 3D software.

I use Cinema4D but still find it faster to apply 'bones' to a figure in Poser and export back to Cinema.

[Becco_UK]

Found some spare time to start the pilots clothing.

The flying 'helmet' is handmade which was probably as quick as using Cinemas' cloth tools. The goggles are reshaped cubes and when happy with the shape, the metal and glass parts were split from the main mesh and allocated their own materials which will be textured later.

The gloves use the figures original mesh, smoothed and also split from the main pilot mesh.

He waits patiently for his coat!