Airplane Study

rcossoli

excellent job of modeling and animation
really excellent, and the music is perfect too
congratulations Boofredlay and solo

silver_shadow

@nickverd said:

I wonder how you guys model all those organic meshs on sketchup.... this looks pretty impossible for me ;/~
Any ref tutorial?!

organic modeling is not really so hard as it seems.
a lot of plug ins that you can get to make the modeling a bit easier.
One you MUSt have:

sub divide and smooth (you need to pay for that)
surface tools ( to offset on sloped surfaces)[tools on surface]
and vector push pull, to push pull a couple of faces in a direction
sketchy FFD, to manipulate the meshes
and that's pretty much that to make quite decent mesh models
But there is longer ways and you don't neeeed to use this..but it speeds up work tremendously

The principle is quite simple. A face needs to be divided into more parts to bend. The more you divide it..the smoother the bends. So if you take a cube, and try to deform it, it might not look that great. So if you divide it into more faces using the sketchups default sandbox tools to drape a grid on to it, or to manually cut the faces or sub divide and smooth it. All of them work. Once you did that, manipulation of each side of the cube is more freely to deform.

Ways to deform, rotate the cube to the side you want to edit, facing upwards, and use the sandbox tools to give the face a bit of deformation (just note, it will select the bottom face too when doing this, so either group the face or isolate it in a way)

other methods is sketchy FFd, which gives you points around the block that you can pull, and it pulls clusters of meshes together and makes it also quite easy to deform a face.

The last option is subdivide and smooth: 2 ways to do this.
one way is just to group it and select the option crease edges or vertices, and subdivide it. It will create a symbol and a simple block over each other. if you manipulate the simple block..the complex symbol will update

Other way, and probably the easiest. divide the block very basic, pull a couple of faces you want to see standing out, even do a bit deconstruction. Once youre happy, triple click on the simple deformed block, and subdivide with subdivide and smooth. It will bring up a menu asking how fine you want the mesh..1 or 2 would be sufficient.
and it will makes a smoother mesh out of it and more polygons.

Hope this is helpful in a way.

nickverd

Wow! Thx alot, rly apreciate that. I'ma pay more atention on sand box tools...

Daniel

Great modeling (Eric) and animation (Pete). I've had that song stuck in my head all weekend. Thanks!

CameronVan

WOW! You must be REALLY fast, or not getting much sleep, if it's all done in the evening. Now to give some careful thought as to what kind of creature's going to be flying this masterpiece/monstrosity...