Testimonial
The Making of HH-60G Pave-Hawk Helicopter
HH-60G Pave-Hawk Helicopter: An Interview with André CantarelAbout André Cantarel
The Interviewcebas: What was your inspiration for the Pave-Hawk? André: As I am very interested in all kinds of flying machines, it was just a question of time until I started to create a helicopter. Additional motivation was creating another reference for my portfolio and to show what I mostly like to do. Click image to watch the animation of some test shots cebas: What software did you use to create the Pave-Hawk animation and why did you choose it? André: The tool here is finalRender Stage-1 R2. I chose this tool because I like to adjust every single part of my shaders (fRAdvanced material) to have the full control over every pixel. If you want a physically correct calculation of shaders, light and so on, you can get it. Also, if you want to go another direction with your own vision, its no problem to get it because everything can be adjusted and mixed even if its not following the rules of realistic physics. cebas: How did you apply finalRender to achieve the desired effects? André: The hull of the helicopter is a mixture of blurry ray-traced reflections using an adjusted fresnel curve. The reflection environment is a combination of colored gradient ramps, physical sky and an HDR image. I weighted them until I got the solution I had in my head. finalRender was also used for the 3d motion blur and GI. cebas: What features helped you achieve your goal and why? André: It´s not a special feature I think. It is more the ability to adjust every single part of your image the way you want. finalRender allows for both quick setups and highly advanced tweaking to tune whatever you need. cebas: What was the most difficult aspect of this project and how did you solve it? André: The most tricky thing was to model the front area of the hull to get the shapes of the windows exactly like the original ones. After that was done successfully, the rest of the helicopter was standard modeling and unwrapping. It may look complicated but all the tiny details are not so hard to model. Much more time goes by doing research, to see how a part looks and to find a photo showing it from the other side. As you can see on the pilots, I also had some problems with organic modeling but I´m willing to learn :) Ah okay, and some problems understanding the rotordisc in detail but fortunately there was a helicopter engineer who explained some things very well (special thanks to Paul Donaghy from GB!). cebas: Can you take us through a step by step overview of your workflow and pipeline? André: First, I collect as many high resolution photos as I can. After looking at them for one or two days, I have all the bigger parts of the helicopter in my head. That is really an important thing and I think that only a thing which is clear in your mind can be modeled in the correct way. It would be a mess if you started shaping the hull, continued working on it and later discovered that there was another big curvature in the hull. In the worst case scenario, this can mean that you have to start from scratch again. After doing the research, I set up some blueprints: I just use them as a rough reference for the shape as they are not very exact. To get the right scaling between forms and angles, I will very often compare the parts to each other. Like the size of the pilot’s door in relation to the size of the big side door which has been compared to the size of the turbines and so on... In 95% of the cases, I use the planar mapping gizmo which is the best solution for almost every shape. After stitching them all together in good paintable chunks, I create the UV snapshots, bring them into photoshop and start painting all the rivets, scratches, and signs. The material of the windows are high resolution scratch & dirt maps painted in photoshop and then put into the channels for refraction, reflection, and specular. The "oily" colors result from distorted colorful gradients: cebas: What was the most fun or rewarding part of this project for you? André: Haha! The first rendering which looked like a helicopter! :) And for sure, having all the nice people of the cgtalk community following the steps of the process and who helped me out with photos, comments, and critiques. Even helicopter crews were sending me videos and references. Thanks to everybody out there! cebas: What projects can we expect from you in the future? André: Hmmm...it would be cool to continue modeling similar things to what I have already done for movies or commercials. cebas would like to personally thank André Cantarel for participating in cebas' "The Making of..." Artist Interview Series. Stay tuned for more inside information from some of today's most talented artists. WIP thread of this project on CGTalk |
My name is André Cantarel. I´m 26 years old and I am living in Heidelberg, Germany. After discovering the world of 3D, I knew right from beginning that this was the stuff I wanted to do in the future and fortunately it worked out. After a few years of playing around with Real3D and later 3d studio max R2 during school, I decided to become a freelancer and that´s what I am today.
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