Unit 9: Pearl Harbor (2001)

For our last unit this year at the Wimbledon College, we had to design a virtual reality ride based on a film. The project was to be done in Unreal Engine with models from Blender. I teamed up with my friend Stanley Harris to make one based on Pearl Harbor (2001) directed by Micheal Bay. After our first class, we sat down and gave it a watch. After which we decided the premise of our ride would be a squadron of American fighter planes arriving as reinforcements after the initial attack and trying to stop more bombing by the Japanese air force. The ride would be experienced from the cockpit of one of the American planes.

After this initial day, I had to focus on a work placement and was only able to produce a concept piece and a half, photo-bashing in photoshop. Photo-bashing is a quick and relative low skill way of getting a concept done, but I want to focus more on hand drawn concept art or composite works with Blender. The reason for the latter is that for the second concept piece I couldn’t find pictures of Japanese planes at the angles I needed. Then I figured out I could just use one of the free models we downloaded and pose it in Blender before screenshotting and adding into photoshop.

In the meantime, Stanley has modelled the island and a large collection of low-poly ships and buildings. The only thing left to do was to download some high-poly airplanes and add them to a scene in Unreal. We found two wonderful planes. The Japanese one was done by Montrec-Inc on cgtrader (https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/aircraft/military-aircraft/fighter-plane-9854a036-e78a-4cbd-ae8d-14a9258533ea) and has no right to look this good and be free.

For the American plane, we needed a detailed cockpit. We opted for a Soviet Yak cockpit done by mikhail_sha on turbosquid (https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-cockpit-yakovlev-yak-3-model/876257) and combined it with an American plane by tamassomogyi on cgtrader (https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/aircraft/military-aircraft/wwii-usa-style-fighter-plane).

I had to retexture all three of these models in Blender because the initial export into Unreal did not take the textures with it.

From here on we had one technical problem after another, leaving barely any room for creative decision making or polish.

The major one being that our plane would just disappear upon starting the game. In Unreal, to have an object follow a path both must be defined in an actor blueprint which opens a coding menu with nodes that can be plugged together. The set-up was given to us by our tutor, but it would just not run. After trying for days and using a different set-up from a youtube tutorial, nothing worked. Eventually our tutor came back to us with a fix. The problem was our level was too big and had to be downscaled. In the process she had to delete most of our carefully placed ships and buildings.

At least our plane was following its path. Only one problem, it did so sideways. It took another day of trouble shooting until we figured out, I had to go back into Blender, rotate the model there and export it again into Unreal. That fixed it.

With one day left before submission, I barely managed to set up and time the path of the main plane and a Japanese plane. During which I found out the camera would move if it turned to hard. Timing the two flight paths correctly is something I still need to figure out.