Vanguard fighter launch demonstration. (Blender 2.49)

This is a fairly simple animation of the CSS Vanguard launching all 13 of its fighters while accelerating at an appreciable rate (about 0.3g (2.96ms^-2)). The fighters are stored in bays stacked vertically, each separated by a grid floor, to allow crew to access the fighters for maintenance, arming and refuelling. The bay is not pressurised, so crew have to wear spacesuits to work on the fighters.
The launch mechanism takes the fighter off it's cradle and extends it out of the bay. here the fighter is pivoted by 90 degrees so that it can be 'dropped'. The dropping effect means the fighters don't have to match the ships acceleration with their own engines prior to release. When the Vanguard isn't accelerating the fighters are released in the orientation they are stored in. The arms can theoretically release the fighter while extending to throw it into space, helping the fighter move away from the ship, without using fuel.

About the animation:
This animation took a horrendously long time to render, mostly because of the transparent shadows needed to make the grid floor look good (each floor is a plane with transparent squares, rather than an actual grille mesh object). It didn't help that I kept noticing things that weren't quite rite, so I fixed them, causing discontinuities, most of these I went back and re rendered bits, but some still remain and are painfully obvious, but I think Sparky really needs a break, and I have revision to do, and I've already started on my next huge project. (Sorry about the long sentences, i hope you're not reading this out loud).
As for the end, I really had no idea of a good way to round it off, and I'd decided I wanted 2000 frames, so I just spent a while panning around and looking at the ship, it's not like I have any training in this sort of thing that would let me know what'll look good... now I'm rambling, maybe 4 AM isn't the bes time to write this sort of thing.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• blender
• render
• 3D
• animation
• CGI
• Kiml42
• youtube
• Vanguard
• starship
• fighter
• launch
• test
• scifi
• science
• fiction
• computer
• space
• stars
• ship
• engines
• plasma
• thrusters
• ramble
• tired
• need
• go
• sleep
• now

[Nordzin]

Love the way the ships launch. Needs music.

[kiml42]

@Nordzin Thanks. It would be nice to have music, but I have far too little idea about rights to use it.

[Alternicity]

Great stuff.

Make sure you back up your most important files though - we just lost a ton of our sf blender files to a faulty hdd.

[kiml42]

@Alternicity Thank you.

I do make sure to have backups. everything I do these days on blender gets backed up online, and synced between my laptop and my notebook computers, so I have an on-site and off-site backup for everything.

I've had hard drives fail on me before, and it can be a serious issue. I'm surprised how many people don't take backups.

[kevinmoore001]

Cool vid, turning up the light will help, well done tho

[kiml42]

@kevinmoore001 Thank you. I think turning it into an AVI did something to the brightness and contrast, the JPEGs are a bit dark, but not quite this bad.

[kiml42]

@Chilledoutredhead You're right, it is a bit too dark, I could really have done with turning up the bay lights a little. I might have to look into making it look brighter with the frames I've got, because I am not going to render this again.

Thank you for your comment.

[Chilledoutredhead]

i like, the model is cool. my only concern is its quite dark, especially on the inside just before the 1st fighter is launched