Self-Disasembling Engine

This asset has been created as part of a school project for ESMA. It is based on a real jet engine, that has been upgraded with alien technology. The engine was supposed to be the primary object of the project scene, so I focused on modelling it as detailed as possible, while still allowing me to animate its disassembly.

Since the engine is built up symmetrical, I was able to create the individual parts one by one and used an array modifier to place them radially around a common center point. I started the construction process with the center core, which also served as the central pivot to place the other engine components around.

For animating the disassembly, I heavily relied on locators. I used 2 locators per individual component that drive both rotation and local translation of the piece set evenly. If the component is repeated multiple times in the engine, all duplicated pieces share the same locators as controllers.

Thanks to this technique, I achieved the following animation.

While this approach worked on this project, I figured out pretty fast that it limited the animation possibilities. It lacks the ability to animate single pieces individually and is restrictive when it comes to animating parts that are not placed around a common center point. I will most likely adapt this technique for more complex animations in future projects.

To implement the asset into the final scene, I exported the animated asset via an alembic file and imported it into my finished render scene in Maya. After applying some textures and a bit of post-processing, I achieved the result below.

Creating this project has been an awesome learning experience, thank you for reading.