Dropship Flight

[Hannes]

I purchased and downloaded a nice dropship model some time ago only to find out, that it's a Unitypackage and can't be opened and/or exported but with Unity. So recently I installed Unity, dug my way through the net to find a way to export it, and was successful eventually. I reworked the textures and created a scene in TG with an overflight above some Gaea terrain. I added a population of trees with 32.000.000 instances, which was quite demanding for my computer. I have 32 GB of RAM, but even after creating a population cache (2GB!) I had to render the sequence in several steps, because I wasn't even able to read my e-mails during the render process. I tried to replace the poulation with fake stones as fake trees, which looked somehow OK, but the real ones looked way better. So I bit the bullet...
The jet engine fire is made with a model of two long planes attached to each other like an X (see image "Object preview"). For the material I used Ulco's transparency falloff solution and masked the image map that controls the opacity additionally with a static power fractal. Thus, since the aircrafts fly at high speed through 3D space I got a nice flickering effect. Originally rendered in 800 X 450 px and upscaled to Full HD with Topaz Video Enhance AI.

I didn't want to compress this clip to fit the maximum size of 5MB. So those who are interested can download it here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sog7cb1evw3984w/DropshipFlight.mp4?dl=0

[KlausK]

Hi Hannes, this looks really nice!

Some flickering on the ground and on the ships but that does not bother me too much.
It`s always a treat to see some animation in TG. I mostly shy away from that.

The camera moves in your animatons look very good to me. They look very cinematic in these short clips.
So slow and smooth. Not like the "impossible" ones where you almost get sick from.

Are the ships animated here as well or is it only camera movement?

CHeers, Klaus

[Hannes]

Hi Hannes, this looks really nice!

Some flickering on the ground and on the ships but that does not bother me too much.
It`s always a treat to see some animation in TG. I mostly shy away from that.

The camera moves in your animatons look very good to me. They look very cinematic in these short clips.
So slow and smooth. Not like the "impossible" ones where you almost get sick from.

Are the ships animated here as well or is it only camera movement?

CHeers, Klaus

Thanks a lot, Klaus!
I used a GI cache for the animation, but since it's rendered in a lower resolution than the final clip, there might be some flickering. It doesn't bother me as well too much.
The camera move is just a flight next to the slightly animated ships (of course the flight path, a little rotation and a bit of movement sideways) with some slow turning around.

[KlausK]

I see. Thanks.

CHeers, Klaus

[masonspappy]

Hannes that is quite impressive. I love those models!

[Dune]

Way cool, Hannes! Very realistic.

For large overviews like this you may consider very low poly trees. I don't know how heavy yours were, but I sometimes use just a 80kB halfdome for far distances. 1 million instances load in less than a second. This was render at AA5, btw.

[Hannes]

Thanks guys!! Good tip, Ulco. I may try this just to see how it looks in comparison!

[Kadri]

Nice animation Hannes

By the way what are your thoughts about Topaz Video Enhance AI ?
I have only Gigapixel AI and with some settings especially you can see if the image is rescaled with it for example.

[Hannes]

Thanks, Kadri.
Actually I think, Topaz Video Enhance AI is a fantastic way to upscale videos (or image sequences as well). The result doesn't look like genuine Full HD renderings (if you choose this format), but it's amazing how close you can get.

[Kadri]

Thanks Hannes.