Patreon Peeks 20: Crafting Pan-Pan's Ship (Patreon)

Hello! It's crazy to think I've made 20 of these posts now. This week, I'd like to share some screenshots of the heftiest asset in my most recent video on Pan-Pan's soundtrack, which you can watch here: https://youtu.be/T8sL5Flwl8E

At around 1:22 it appears: the iconic spaceship that the protagonist in the game pilots. How was I able to get it to sweep into the frame like that? By modeling the entire thing from scratch in Blender!

Thankfully, the ship is made of mainly primitives and flat-color unlit shaders, so a couple of screenshots from the game made for an adequate reference. Once I had the modeling complete, I had the camera move through the thin Nurbs-curve cables to sufficiently reveal the ship. But I couldn't just stop there: the ship in-game is constantly in motion, giving it some life. So I needed to craft some animation for this model.

I'm pretty sure the animation in-game is a rigged model, but instead of creating an armature, I made procedural animations with hooks, a fun feature in Blender. They're a bunch of empty objects to which parts of the Nurbs curves are hooked, with varying degrees of influence from 0% to 100%, and varying falloffs of influence like a bell curve, a sphere, a parabola, etc. In this way, I could hook the bottom ends of the cables to the hull, the top ends of the cables to the balloon, and the middles of the cables to that cylinder between them. Then, I made four more hook objects to animate the cables swaying about, in my opinion the most charming part of the ship's animation.

Here you can see the hook objects as empty cubes and spheres. The selected one has less than 100% strength and a bell curve falloff, so moving it around will bend the cables, but with a bit of slack.

Now that this custom "rig" was set up, all that was left was to animate everything. I'm pretty sure the ship flying in-game is a looping animation, but here I made it procedural so that I could keep it on screen for a while without it getting too boring. I took the cables, the hull, the balloon, and gave all their positions some pseudo-random noise. Here's an example with the cable controllers:

That mess of wobbly red and green lines represent the X and Y positions of those objects, so they wobble about without a discernible pattern forever (er, about 1000 frames). I did the same thing to the Z (up and down) positions and the rotations of the balloon, the hull, and the cylinder in between. All of these combined make the ship more fun to look at, and with a color gradient and a simple particle system of stars in the background, I'd say it comes rather close to Pan-Pan's title screen aesthetic!