process

about

this was a fun project where i recreated a shot from evangelion (see below). this aircraft makes a few appearances but i’d say most notably a fleet of them get destroyed in the first angel fight in episode 1, and its also the aircraft that picks up gendo from the graveyard after he and shinji visit Yui’s grave.

it’s a Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft, probably inspired by the V22 Osprey. i loved doing hard surface modelling but stylized with less realism, it was a very freeing experience c: check out this awesome fucking design document though. beautiful reference.

technical details

so for this shot recreation i started by creating a toon shader, which i only know how to do in EEVEE renderer. i make it a rule of thumb to use Cycles renderer instead, unconditionally, but i just couldn’t make it work this time around.

all the parts of the model that are black ( cockpit, lines, artificial shadows ) have a roughness of 1.0 (that’s the maximum) so they totally disperse most reflections, and they’re pure black so they absorb as much light as possible. during compositing i replaced pure black with a very very dark green, for flavour.

the windows at the front are my favourite part. to begin with i just painted the inside of the cockpit black, including the interior faces of the uh. whatsit. cross bar bits. WINDOW FRAMES.im definitely gonna use this trick again next time i model a vehicle holy shit, making cockpits takes forever xD

next i duplicated the lower windows and flipped their normals, effectively rendering their backfaces, and turned them bright orange. the windows themselves are transparent except where there’s bright white reflections. the lower front window there is also made brown manually to like, replicate the shot.

while most of the lineart is simply drawn onto the textures, the outline around the edge of the model is created using the inverted hull technique. its pretty robust, even against floating geometry and mediocre topology.

thx for looking >u>