The Last Ratefight (BLENDER) Rookie Awards 2022 Submission

This is a project I started in late March specifically to compete in the Rookie Awards. It takes place in the skies over the Iron Curtain, an F4E wanders peacefully through the clouds when suddenly a MiG23 pings the radar. The two F4E pilots will have to dogfight the Soviet aircraft in a fight to the death. Disclaimer: In real life, aircraft such as the f4E and the MiG23 weren't made to excel at dogfighting, but rather at Beyond Visual Range (BVR) missile slinging, scoring kills from 30km and beyond. Everything has been done by me except the music (Vladyslav Saychenko). The models, textures and environments have been made simple to speed up render time.

Scene layout with particle test and fake explosion, color grading

The making process of the aircraft can be seen on my Rookie Portfolio:

F4 Phantom (USA) https://www.therookies.co/projects/36858 

MiG23 (USSR) https://www.therookies.co/projects/37059

Stubs, technical goofs and limitations. 

-Stubs: Pilots lack feet and have been rigged with basic bones, face has also have been rigged, however due to technical and skill issues with hair, I had to make the helmets opaque (which is how they actually are in real life)

Cockpits aren't modeled, aircraft haven't been rigged with bones, but rather using blend shapes for the wing movile parts, however the results came close to decent.

-Technical goofs: The stickers of the roundels and the "no step" wing marks sometimes clip through the mesh. The sections of the right engine nozzle on the f4e overlap. The camera is stuttering because I don't know how to do camera tracking so I had to animate it frame by frame instead of using a path constraint as dolly.

Animation curves are horrible.

Pilot seatbelts clip through their shoulders. Sometimes there's rolling shutter in some areas.

-Difficulties: Modeling the F4's engine nozzles transition from the square body to the two cylinders on the engine output, fire and smoke simulations (discarded)

-Limitations: Gunfire, missile explosions and flares have the same procedure: very bright emission objects with the shape of a muzzle flash that hides and shows up 1-0-1 each frame (gunfire), hand modeled cloud of fire and smoke; physics simulations made the files crash so I used procedural volumetric paths for contrails and explosions. 

Thanks to: Thanks to Alberto Mercado, Laura Menendez and Juan Nieto, because they have boosted my gameness and helped me find the motivation to carry on and finish the project against the demotivation I had due to not knowing enough Blender to deliver a competent project.