Highway to the Danger Zone…
The team at Rising Sun completed 129 shots on the dogfight sequence, where two f-35 fighter jets are in a dogfight with a pair of unmanned drones (or UCAV’s).
This involved creating the assets of the fighter jet and UCAV, as well as the Mojave Desert environment, which was a combination of full cg shots and augmented shots from helicopter reference plate shot on location. Additionally there were 33 shots inside the cockpit, which involved a blue-screen actor composited with environment, cockpit extension, cockpit glass and visor glass.
The team started by using reference of real F35 fighter jets, and talking with military pilots about the sequence to gather information regarding formation and types of combat tactics. The final jet was a hybrid of the F35B (vertical takeoff) and F35A (Conventional Take off). There were two of these modelled with decal & dirt variations. A lot of work was done to update and refine our hard surface shaders to ensure the planes reacted to light as you would expect when compared to live action reference.
The UCAV’s, which are an extrapolated design from prototypes that are in use in the military, were designed to be sleek and stealthy. The stealth nature of the surface had lighting implications for the shaders to ensure we got a realistic matte finish.
There were a number of plates that were shot on location from a helicopter which were used as projections on geometry with updated camera moves, to get the feeling of being shot from a jet fighter, and to ensure the client got the composition for each shot. These were also combined with fully CG environments utilizing a 16K sky dome, middle distance layers of 2d matte painted objects on cards, and close proximity interactive clouds developed in Houdini.
To start the sequence is a chase through the canyons, very low to the ground, which was where the plate material really helped. We then have vertical climbing up to 50,000 feet for a freefall back to earth. The finale was an ejection sequence where his plane has gone in to a flat spin and he has to eject.
There was quite a variety in the environment work for each of these scenarios, as we introduced various cues such as haze, sky color, and environmental effects.
The abundance of reference footage from films such as Top Gun and the documentary Red Flag, gave the team a huge library of reference footage, in addition to those available online. It also motivated some of the animators to run around the hallways screaming ‘Gooooose!’….
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