F/A 18C Hornet

[Jordan]

Thanks again everyone, much appreciated!

I haven't thought much about shading, but I could certainly go into that. The only downside might be that, as a hardbodied subject, the shading won't be all that complex (mostly paint with some plexiglass, metal, rubber, and fiberglass here and there). I think that there are some cool rigging opportunities - not only with the landing gear and shocks, but with deforming tires and maybe automatically animating the control surfaces (flaps, elevators, rudders, etc.) based on the motion of the craft.

Oh yeah, simple shader setup will be good enough to show for layman like me

And rigging will be great too... to demostrate most of the transform tools that available in houdini.(hence making a transformer animation always my dream.)

thanks,

jordan.

[Guest Swann]

I haven't thought much about shading, but I could certainly go into that. The only downside might be that, as a hardbodied subject, the shading won't be all that complex (mostly paint with some plexiglass, metal, rubber, and fiberglass here and there)

I was thinking about shader that atomaticaly detects edges, and around those edges generate erased paint. You know, something like this.

Edited April 20, 2008 by SWANN

[stu]

Something like...what?

The aircraft doesn't typically have wear that gives way to bare metal, as most of the airframe isn't actually metal. But I guess if you wanted to do that sort of thing, you could fire particles from head on (all of the wear would come from the direction of it's travel, I suppose), have the particles stick to the craft, attribute transfer the UVs to the particles, render them in UV space, and then apply the result as some sort of deterioration to the painted texture.

Yes, I'll definitely go into rigging. I think that there is more rigging to be done on something like this than one first expects, especially if it has to be able to land. They're mostly hard transformations, but I think that the landing gear will provided some interesting challenges:

Update coming today.

[pagefan]

Nice modeling so far Stu! That landing gear, with all it's detail, will be challenging.

[stu]

Not really an update, but an explanation for what I've been up to. Through the work that I've done so far and by working with the blueprints, it has become clear that some of the details on the top view and side view of the blueprints don't line up exactly, so I'm working on fixing them as well as double checking the work that I've completed so far so that I can proceed knowing that everything is sound.

[LadyEvey]

Not really an update, but an explanation for what I've been up to. Through the work that I've done so far and by working with the blueprints, it has become clear that some of the details on the top view and side view of the blueprints don't line up exactly, so I'm working on fixing them as well as double checking the work that I've completed so far so that I can proceed knowing that everything is sound.

No one can fault you for tweaking it is after all a huge part of modeling. I just wanted to chime in as well and thank you for posting this and for being so detailed. I look forward to checking back for your progress.

[Allegro]

still working on this?

[stu]

Yup.

Edited June 24, 2008 by stu

[Jared]

ok so since it's been almost 15 months that it's over?

Edited September 19, 2009 by Jared