Plane flyover animation

[bigmike1020]

Animated a fun little flyover of my lighthouse scene from earlier in the course! I won’t bore you with the whole animation, but I’ll share one frame that I liked. It’s really amazing how easy it is to use textures! Even textures that are just single images found online, like our Spitfire plane. I suppose you just have to find a good side profile image, and you can model pretty much anything.

Would it be difficult to model the pilot inside the cockpit? Just lower the alpha on the cockpit glass to make it transparent, then add the pilot as another interior mesh?

[CoreyKnecht]

@bigmike1020

Would it be difficult to model the pilot inside the cockpit? Just lower the alpha on the cockpit glass to make it transparent, then add the pilot as another interior mesh?

This is actually something I tried to do when I did this part of the course, although I didn’t add a pilot. In EEVEE, it’s actually pretty straightforward:

• In the Shading Workspace, create the cockpit’s glass material with an alpha value of less than 1. You don’t have to use a glass shader; the PrincipledBSDF will do just fine.
• With this new material still selected, in the Inspector, click the Material sidetab, then look for Settings–>Blend Mode and change this to Alpha Blend. You may also want to set Shadow Mode (just beneath) to None.

Cycles is a different matter entirely and I don’t know it very well, but I’m sure it can be done =)

[NP5]

Nicely done. Including a rotating light?

Yes you could make a pilot inside. It can be a simple like the plane, an image over a very simple shape, or as complicated and detailed as you want to do. You need to decide how much is noticeable in the animation. A still can be studied more closely but a moving animation can’t.

[CoreyKnecht]

@NP5

A still can be studied more closely but a moving animation can’t.

And I forgot to mention above that this is why I decided not to model a pilot =)

[bigmike1020]

the Material sidetab, then look for Settings–>Blend Mode and change this to Alpha Blend

Thanks for describing this! With EEVEE, I was seeing a dithering effect. But I think with Blender 4.2.0, the right setting is now “Render Method” set to Blended.

Now I have a nice little pilot head! I haven’t found a good texture to use as the head, but I think this is looking pretty good for a first render I’ll tackle a rotating lighthouse and changing it to a dusk scene.

[CoreyKnecht]

@bigmike1020

But I think with Blender 4.2.0, the right setting is now “Render Method” set to Blended.

Interesting! Now that you mention it, I do remember Blender Team mentioning something about making changes to this area, and I’m still using 4.1 at the moment. In any case, great job getting it working =)