RC Helicopter

Hey people! :slight_smile:
Latest project I have been playing around with. I saw a video on these things recently so I had to make one, and it was also a lot of fun learning about how they work as I went along. Made in Blender 2.71, rendered in BI. Some textures made in GIMP

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awesome i always want to make rc cars but i get to lazy to take pics and actually do it cuz i know its a lot of modeling. it came out super clean. you should try to make a simple game in bge with it. cya

I would still love to see this composited in some footage as animation, but yes, this is awesome

@Jeremiah R: Thanks very much! :slight_smile: No BGE plans for it unfortunately :stuck_out_tongue:

@Craig Jones: Thank you! I was thinking of am outdoor picture with this flying in the air, but my GIMP skills are lacking a bit, I must say. I think I might have a plan though. If it’s not going to be too much of a hassle, I might just do it :slight_smile:

Why not use the Blender Compositor? Probably easier to set up than Gimp…

I was thinking about something like this:


Any suggestions would be welcome, but animating this is out of the question of course :slight_smile:

ah, the motion blur is the ticket. You would have to animate the blades and rotor to get the motion blur right, but you might try an experiment with setting them on a different render layer so that you can isolate them to blur just those parts… tough job, no matter what

@Craig Jones: The easy part is blurring the blades in top view, then using the perspective tool to angle it, but then you have the rest of the parts that are moving with the blades. Easy from the top, but not from a tilted side. :frowning: I was thinking of using layers, or at least rendering out the parts in question a bunch of times after slightly rotating them each time, then somehow blurring them at the correct angle.

i would think if you rigged it it would take one bone for the top blades one bone for the back blade and one bone for the blue gears wouldnt take much to animate them spinning. you could even do one more bone for the helicopter. and actually animate it pretty easily. maybe another way to do the blur is to fake it make a circle mesh with a alpha texture already showing a pattern that the blur makes. just do it for the blades top and back and to trick the gears to be blur just make one that is smooth. maybe the easiest way i can think of.

I wish it were that easy, but my PC is crap, so I’m not animating anything at the moment, especially for one still of it flying outside. The helicopter itself is around 900,000 tris with all the subsurf turned on, so it would be a struggle anyway :slight_smile: There’s positively got to be a photo-manipulation trick for this, I only really need to blur the metal parts in the same direction/angle as the blades. :smiley:

Could you mask that area and just use a radial blur?

This was pretty cool http://www.photoimprovements.co.uk/tutorials/FakeRotatingHelicopterBlades/index.html

@Craig Jones: I’m experimenting with a few things now, you guys got me excited to make it look like it’s flying :slight_smile: Thanks for the video, I’ll be checking that out shortly :slight_smile:

Experiment with GIMP motion blur and perspective:



Perspective seems to work well:


Not bad at all, Vicky, let’s see the rest of it now

great work vicky! it turned out wonderful, and it was a joy to follow your work in your sketchbook :slight_smile:

Thanks Doris! :smiley:

This really is some fine work V.

Have you considered doing some blueprint renders of the detailed mechanics?

I’m liking some of your motion blur experiments as well as some of the macro shot renders. you’ve done an excellent job on this project.

Thanks Anthony! :slight_smile: I might throw some pics of the mechanics in the Edge thread :slight_smile:

@harleynut97: Thanks a lot! I was playing around with it today as a matter of fact, and I sorta-kinda got something going on. :stuck_out_tongue: It involved a few renders, some uv mapped circles, and a few layers in GIMP. Just please disregard any lighting/shadows, it’s just something I slapped together. :slight_smile:


I’m thinking render the helicopter with environment lighting turned on, and a sun…basically light it really well because it will never move. That also involves finding a good angle of course, before you commit to it. Then, render the blades by themselves, and motion blur them in GIMP. Apply those to slightly extruded circles in Blender, and put them on their correct levels. For the actual rotor parts, I think maybe just keep rotating them and rendering them by themselves and throw them together in GIMP? I’ll keep playing… :smiley:

Vicky, let me ask a question since your indeed a BI expert. In cycles, getting realistic motion blur is as easy as creating some little movement animation, clicking one button and rendering either an animation or still render. What does it take to get motion blur out of BI?

The only reason I ask is that I know you feel your computer is not up to doing animations. But if motion blur is possible with BI, why not duplicate your file… set up a quick animation of rotating the blades over a short period of time… and then render 1 single frame of the animation which would then capture the motion blur. You computer is definitely capable of rendering a frame, the motion blur might add a little more time to the still render, but not that much.

@harleynut97: I’m trying it in Blender now, and my experiments have been promising so far. I have the rotor assembly separated from the rest so I only will need to animate that(the angle of the final shot I chose will enable me to overlay the motion blur, I’ll do the tail in GIMP) :slight_smile: Stay tuned, I might be hitting you or the ghost up for some help! :smiley: