Modeling a thrust vectoring engine

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This is an older modeling tutorial, but some might not be aware of it. The tutorial goes over modeling the engine, setting up a system of constraints to animate the model and even setting up a simple particle system to simulate the engine exhaust.

The author says the following of the tutorial:

I’ve seen a lot of good (Blender) animations, made by skilled people, which involved jet engines. Unfortunately, most of them didn’t look too impressive as far as the jet engines are concerned. Hoping I could do a better job myself (and whether I did, I’ll leave up to you…), I decided to investigate the matter and experiment until I had a convincing result. For the maximum effect, I decided to make a thrust vectoring jet engine, as opposed to a fixed jet, suitable for animation. This involved a complex set of constraints and particle physics, but it worked out very well.

The .blend files are even available for download. Find the tutorial here. And the original thread at Blenderartists announcing the tutorial can be found here.

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    • stupiduser

      thx 4 the tutorial
      by the way i’m first =) yay

    • MeneerDePeer

      Nice!

      >> by the way i’m first =) yay

      Congrats on this great life time achievement!

    • http://www.halfgaar.net Halfgaar

      Hi, I’m the author of the tutorial in question. For those of you who download the blend files, you may notice that the particle system doesn’t work in 2.46 anymore. I don’t know how to fix that. Even if I make a new particle emitter in that same project, it doesn’t render. Any tips are welcome.

    • kingjames

      Go to the bake tab in the particle buttons section and press the ‘bake’ button for the desired frames. Do the particles show up then?

    • http://www.halfgaar.net Halfgaar

      I do see something, but not particles… I white line jumping all over the place…

      The thing is, the particles are being calculated. I notice because of the slowdown. But they are not shown; in the viewport nor the render. And even when I create a new mesh with a new emitter, no particles are shown.

    • http://www.halfgaar.net Halfgaar

      Ah, I found out what’s wrong. See the compatibilty note at:

      http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/particles/

      I will be correcting the particle system soon…

    • http://www.rgbk.org Bmud

      The new particle system really needs to be more friendly. I wonder if its documentation is even done yet.

    • http://www.halfgaar.net Halfgaar

      I have noticed that the new system, even with cache, is slower… This jet engine uses a lot of particles, and I used to be able to speed it up by setting the “disp” parameter low, to display only a few particles, but that has little effect in 2.46. That is, visually it has effect, but not in terms of speed.

      Anyway, the particle system has been (partially) fixed, but the particle deflectors behave strange as well, and I can only see a bug as the reason. With damping 1, they still bounce particles, whereas new meshes with the exact same deflection settings, do behave properly.

      And, the material needs tweaking, because that too looks different.

    • http://home.deds.nl/~mp/ ysvry

      better make a totaly new tut then , and sent encountered bugs to the dev that developed the new particle system. ;)

    • http://www.halfgaar.net Halfgaar

      The changes are nearing completion. Soon there will be an updated version.