"Dog Fight"
By Rolando Rosales

Introduction

The reason for taking this course is my interest in 3D graphics. This has been my first chance (not including some tutorials here and there) to actually use a 3D graphics program.  The program used is 3D Studios MAX 5.0. This is one of the most powerful programs in the 3D industry. There are many other comparable programs for 3D graphical animations such as MAYA, Bryce, Softimage and Poser, just to name a few, however I chose 3D Studios Max for its large areas of support and tutorials on the web. If it wasn't for most of these tutorials, I would of had no idea how to use this program, and my animation would of probably been nothing but a box with wings.  The help and support of the tutorials allowed me to learn a a great deal about how 3d graphics work and that you don't need to be sketch artist to animate in 3D!!

When using 3D Studios MAX, although your imagination is unlimited, without a high end system the result of the performance is fairly poor. There are many other additions that I did add, but had to remove them due to time and hardware restrictions I was unable to. I also learned that when your doing a project such as this, is to always stick to the main plan, or else your always going to have newer and better ideas and the updating will never end!! Just Save them for your next Project!!

Modeling

The animation consists of several different models including the jet fighters, the landscape, the missiles and the final model, each having there own special effects.

The Jet Fighters:

The jet fighters were the first things I modeled. Following a tutorial in 3D Studios for a spaceship, i created my own Jet Fighter. The missiles were done separately as they had there own special effects.

                             Before

                              After

 

The Landscape:

By far, I found that the landscape was the most difficult to model. I was so surprised as to how it was done when I finally got the chance to make one.  I wanted a sunset or dusk-type scene, around mountains, so my first scene I wasn't very impressed with.  A few days before due date I changed the landscape.

                                      Before

                          After

Special Effects

After Burners/Missile Trail: Some of the Special Effects I used were mainly particle systems. For the Jets, I used a spray particle system with deflectors at the end that push the particles making them look like they have streaks. When in motion they push out and look almost like afterburners. The same Special Effect was used for the Missiles.

 

Clouds/Fog: Special Effects were also used on my landscape.  Instead of using a spray I used cloud particles,  5 on the top, to simulate real world clouds and one circular on on the bottom for Volumetric Fog.

Explosions: Using the bitmap texture from 3D Studio's Library. Explosion was created using a an AVI file placed on a plane as a bitmap.

Sounds

The sounds for this animation were taken from the soundtrack to the movie "Pearl Harbor" and include the song "War" by Hans Zimmerman. All sounds were downloaded from KAZAA, and to add them to my animation I used Windows Movie Maker.

Links

Back to 2003 animations.