C-11 Skydagger - Animation - CelCon

(Part of my own IP.)

The Skydagger is a versatile fighter designed to covertly take out bombers and naval ships, preferably at night, by plunging down from high altitudes with its engine shut down to fire its double barrel 35 mm cannon at unsuspecting targets. With the recoil and forces of the cannon, the propeller blades have to be folded in as to not get distorted or blasted off from the forces and ever increasing drag.

This was a fun project to test the idea of "low poly by design" and putting my concept features to animation. Translating the initial design to 3D was the first challenge. Staying true to it made it feel too frail and lightweight, so I made some changes and borrowed shapes from swallows and dart tails to lend it some sturdiness and believability.
At about 2000 tris it was a nice challenge to hide the simplicity, but by making UV islands out of everything that I wanted to be a panel, it sped up adding bolts and edge wear in Substance Painter. The amount of sharp edges I could hide while texturing surprised me a bit. This also made sure that I could apply a blurry noise across all of their normals without them blending together between panels to get that bent and distorted metal look. This plane has been in service for a long time after all.

The final challenge was putting everything into motion. With both my Houdini and Embergen licences run out I had to lean on my familiarity in Unreal to wrap things up, which meant I had to assemble the plane with a blueprint and use Niagara instead of volumetrics for my VFX. Making the blueprint had one glaring issue, the pivots on the propeller blades could not be edited directly, I fixed that by pairing each with an arrow component which could act as pivot points for them. The arrows were then paired to a hidden cube, that way I could spin all of them together AND fold them individually.
A minor issue was the glass material of the canopy. It has parts that are opaque and metallic so I had to use an opacity mask with dithering. This wasn't an issue when I switched up to UE 5.7 and set up a Substrate material for the second animation though.