F16 - Calgary Military Museum

Darek Zborowski

Computer Graphics 3710 Project



Introduction:


For this project I have selected a jet plane that's displayed in the Military Museum of Calgary. Every time I drive by this unique place,
I take a look at the plane. I was always impressed the shape of it and thought that this is going to be the thing I'd like to model.

Software:


Unfortunately before starting this project, I had no basic experience with any graphical tools. Blender being the one of many open source software was the winner
and The one I have chosen. Since Blender is so widely popular, it had many tutorial videos online that helped me finish this model.

Progress:


The first time I opened Blender I was amazed on the number of buttons that were available for me. I had no idea what each of them did so I had to get help.
After watching endless hours of tutorials and reading the beginner section I had some kind of an idea of what was going on (at least that's what I thought).
In order to draw this plane I have used:
- A UV sphere for the body,
- Plane for the winds
- And a cone for the tip.



I wanted to "simulate" the jet to be in flight instead of placed on the ground. I wanted to create a more "realistic" sky then what was available by default.
To do this, I have created another large UV sphere, cut it by half and surround the jet, camera and lightning by it. Then I found a nice sky texture that was available
online and project it onto the sphere. This gave me a nice sky look in the background. Since the plane is up in the sky, I have turned off the shadowing
on the sphere just to make sure it looks right. After spending about 15 hours on this, the final result was a success.


To finish this, I modeled the jet using default textures and gave it some "war tattoos" just to make it look nicer.

Difficulties:


The biggest difficulty with this project (to no surprise), was to get used to the software. Till now, the only painting software I ever used was Windows Paint,
therefore it was a huge step for me to jump into something as professional as Blender. Once that was done, it took me way longer than expected to create that "realistic" sky.
There was some matching and cutting involved as well as using different kind of key combination in order to get this thing right.

Conclusion:

Overall this was an amazing experience. This made me realize how hard computer graphics actually is, and appreciate people that work with this every day.
I know that my model does not look astonishing but it ended up looking better than I expected. The fact that this tool is free to use is even more mind blowing.