Asp Mk II Animation

A few people have asked how I did this animation, so I thought I'd offer a brief explanation here. It was created mainly in 3d Studio MAX, with a little help from some other software.

The sun at the beginning of the animation is a standard MAX lens flare, with the phase and inferno animated.

To create the hyperspace cloud, I used the 'Real Lens Flare' plugin. This effect took quite a while to animate, as I had clearly defined ideas of what a hyperspace cloud should look like. The hard part was translating my imagination to the parameters of the lens flare. I started by using the standard MAX lens flare, but found it unrealistic for this purpose.

The most time consuming task was to create a photorealistic Asp. I used the Rhino 3D NURBS modeller to create the mesh, spending a lot of time creating and deleting ludicrous guns! I settled on some more subtle guns in the end, cut vents for the engine, and added other details.

The textures are simply filtered noise with the pirate flags pasted on top, created in Photoshop. I found PhotoShop to be a little innacurate to produce the bump maps, so I used AutoCAD to draw them, and rasterized and filtered them in Photoshop.

The soundtrack was created using SoundForge. I combined filtered jet noises, a gunshot noise and a library doppler noise to create the finished result. This is my first experimentation with sound, so I was quite pleased with the result.