Toony Vought F4U Corsair
Here's my interpretation of a Vought F4U Corsair. This plane was WW2 fighter and dive bomber, its unique downward sloping wings allowed for a larger propeller without needing taller landing gears, and the folding wings allowed it to fit inside an aircraft carrier. I wanted to create toony version of this plane that is somewhere between lifelike, and stylized.
I created the entire plane in Zbrush starting with a free form mesh squeezing and pulling it to get the rough proportions and style, before rebuilding it using the Zmodeller tool and then slicing it up into the various subtools for all the moving parts. Details like the engine cowls and the landing gear bays were tricky to cut out and still maintain the smooth body lines then closed.
Once the modelling was complete I UV'ed it Maya and UV layout before rigging it for animation and painting it in Substance Painter. I mixed together with the audio for the video in Adobe Audition from multiple sounds effects, pitch shifting then engine noise to simulate take-off and landing and panning the channels left and right as the plane rotates around the screen.
The completed video with audio mixed together from various sound effects and pitch-shifted and panned to suit the clip.
The decals were all created within Substance painter using the default Alphas creating masks.
I was originally going to make the windows black and not bother modelling the interior, but I'm glad I did, It was quite a bit of extra work, but I really think it adds quite a lot to the model's scale and I really like the contrasting green interior
Creating these folding landing gears in Zbrush and making sure they would fit inside the landing gear bay was quite a challenge. So too was rigging them later on.
For the folding wings, ailerons, flaps etc, I first modelled then complete extended wing making sure to have a nice smooth flow, then I sliced it into separate subtools so that I could model the inside edges
Most of the micro-detail such as panel lines and rivets were done in Substance Painter.
To create the blurred propeller, I took an orthographic screenshot in Substance Painter of the textured propeller geometry from the front, then used the radial blur tool in Photoshop to distort the image, then used that as a texture on a plane.
The original model with more realistic proportions was used as my starting point before moving, scaling and squashing it to give it more character.
I used the Expose tool in Zbrush to separate all the individual subtools to create a nice Normal map and AO bake.
I also exported an unExposed version switched between the two when working in Substance painter. I baked a new AO map with the plane assembled and combined it with the Exposed baked AO as each map had nice results in different areas
Along with lots of photo reference, this video, in particular, was quite helpful with understanding how the landing gears fold away.
An animation test of the folding landing gears. they are not 100% perfect, but they do the trick.
Here you can see the relatively low poly mesh. I later added a smooth modifier to this to create a higher res version for the video and still renders.
This is how the model looks in Zbrush with the landing gears extended thought the closed flaps.