The Making of Die Mehrkanonen Intro

Hello and welcome. This is a walkthrough of how I make the intro of the video Die Mehrkanonen.

I'm organizing this walkthrough through the subjects listed below which is also chronologically accurate to my production process:

➜ Using Blender
➜ Preparation
➜ Ship Models
➜ Animating the Turret
➜ Animating the Ship
➜ Ocean
➜ Shells
➜ Camera
➜ Lighting and Lightning(s)
➜ Rain Effect
➜ Fog Effect
➜ Volumetrics
➜ Rendering

Blender

Why Blender out of all things? Haven't you been using Maya for all previous projects?

Put it simply, its my personal desire to jump on Blender. I've been seeing an upwards trend of Blender usage and I thought its time to jump ship. Yes it took a while to learn (costs production time), and I work more slowly than usual because of it, but at the end I think its the better option for a 3D program.

Much streamlined, better UI, easy to navigate. And its free.

This whole intro is made without any major plugin as well (Except one covered later in Camera), and rendered through Blender Cycles.

Disclaimer: I am no expert (yet), all these things I learned is through tutorials on YouTube and I definitely not the guy able to write proper courses. If you have difficulties following this walkthrough, reach me through Messages/Twitter DM so I can explain better and incorporate additions.

Preparation

I learn Blender through Blender Beginner Donut Tutorial series which is more than enough to cover what's necessary. The important thing to know are knowing all the techniques to do certain things, think parenting objects, separating polygons, setting up origin, constraints, setting up materials, etc.

Getting comfortable with the program first is better, otherwise its easy to get lost on watching other guides.

The pacing of this intro is based on the Tanzdiktator intro. Make sure you have the music imported to the project, as many sequences requires the keyframe to be in sync with the beat.

Ship Models

The ship models is taken from Gamesmodel3D


Model has been converted to .obj format that can directly be imported to Blender, textures included.

These is ingame model so it doesn't really have the highest detail, but its enough for my render since I don't do close ups.

Animating the Turret

We need to animate and rig all the 4 main turrets.

First is to separate the barrels from the turret so they becomes their own object. Do it for all 4 barrels. Here's the tutorial on how to join/separate objects.


Notice the outline on the turret. The barrels needs to be separated first.

Then use Armature/Rigging tool and parent them to the turret. I use this tutorial for rigging. I then do it for all 4 turrets.

Next I make a controller that can move all 16 barrels at once, tutorial on Drivers and making controllers right here.


When done correctly you can use the controller to raise/lower the barrels.


If rigging is too much, you can just parent each barrel to the turret and rotate them manually (But before that the object's origin needs to be properly set, guide here), but be prepared for A LOT of keyframing).

Afterwards, parent all the barrels to their corresponding turret, then parent the turrets to the ship itself. The hierarchy should look like this:


If you can do this then its done correctly:

Animating the Ship

Great thing about ships is that they're... pretty static.

Well not really, but straightforward enough to be animated. The relative size means no big movement necessary, so after you create the path of where the ship is going (Tutorial to move object along path here), you only need to add bow/stern bops and the minor listing when it turns by animating the rotation of the ship.


(Idk why mine veers off the path but you might have better luck)

Then animate the turret/barrels made on previous section, swinging to port and raising the elevation of the barrels.

Lastly is to playback the animation in real time and check if the speed is correct relative to ship's size, don't want the ship to move too fast and doesn't look believable.

Ocean

This is where I spent the majority of my production time...and ended up using the simplest solution.

I tried using FLIP Fluids for actual fluid simulation. While the result is promising, I couldn't get it to look correctly to the scale of the ship, because it takes way too much time just to calculate the resolution needed to accurately portray 50,000 ton warship moving through water. And after hours of calculation, it needs to be restarted If it doesn't look right. I did this over and over.

I end up not getting the look I wanted, and after spending around a week tinkering with this, I gave up because I just couldn't progress.

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Next I tried using Dynamic Paint. This is a middle ground between true fluid simulation and texture/effects fakery. Much faster than simulation but will get the look necessary.

Finally proper foam and waves (although as textures on the ocean surface only), on par with old 3D naval games with more fidelity. Looks like the way to go for this project.


...Not really

Despite nailing the overall look, it has a big downside. Which is repeating wave patterns.


I cannot allow this because most of the shot I'll be making are long sweeping shots that shows the horizon as well. And once again, if I increase the resolution, things slow down to a crawl.

So, after much consideration, I decided to prioritize on making the ocean look as accurate as possible, with zero physics interaction with the ship for efficiency. As for the ship waves? I'm gonna cheat them later.

I'm using Large Scale Ocean in Blender tutorial to make the ocean. Its a long one, but its the best option for large scale ocean. I increase the wave height a bit for the stormy look while keeping other parameters the same. Since its using texture/displacement mapping, everything is fast.

Here's the Viewport Shading:


With Material Shading (notice the displaced water):


And finally the Render Output:


Once satisfied you only need to make sure the waves didn't reach the ship's deck.
Congrats, you can now make still renders of ship on water.

Shells

The shells is a very simple cylinder with pointy tips and reflective texture, nothing more to it.


While the shell trail is just a very long cylinder, with red material, and parented to the shell. Then you duplicate them 16 times.


Now to make the shell's ballistic using Path. Create a parabolic arc starting from the point where the ship shoots, to where the shell landed. Put the target ship as well while we're here.


Using the Object along curve tutorial, make a dummy object (call it "shell carrier/proxy" or some sort) that follows said arc. This dummy is used as a guide for all 16 shells, by parenting them to the dummy.


Next is to position each shells to their corresponding barrels. No need to be precise, just roughly where it should be, since the camera on this part of the shot is moving very fast.

Again, make sure it is on the exact frame of when the gun shoots (its synced with the Tanzdiktator intro on the first beat drop), then keyframe the position and rotation.


Now, move over to the last shot where the shells hits the broadside Cheshire. In this shot, I keyframed all the shells at the exact point where it lands and hits the citadels, because I want to that smooth transition.


Side note: The shell trail is are bending on the recorded footage, which I didn't anticipate when making it on 3D, but I decide to handwave it

Camera

You think ocean is enough headache? Now comes the real fun part, because while it is easy to learn how to animate the camera, getting it to look the way you want is an endless pursuit of 'perfection'. Just a caution in case you're working this on a timeframe.

For this project, I use two constraints for the camera:

➜ Setting up the camera to be on follow Path (tutorial here)
➜ Setting up the camera to look/track at an object (tutorial here)

The camera will be on a path, and also tracking a dummy used to focus on the subjects (This will be the ship, and then the shell grouping)

This is the camera path:


This is the dummy which is just an empty sphere that the camera tracks on:


Here is how it looked when all put together, with the camera preview up until the moment the gun fired:


And here's the rest of the shell flight:


Noticed the shaking effects during shell flight? This is made using a free plugin called Camera Shakify. Does what it says on the title. Just set the type of shake, influence and scale to the value you wanted, keyframed exactly when the shell takes flight.

My settings:


The camera has standard 35mm focal length, and 21:9 aspect ratio (set this on Output Properties).

Animating the camera has big impacts on look, feel, and narrative, but as said earlier, be careful of how much "perfection" you wanted out of just the camera.
Maybe you have animated the camera, but there is one specific moment where it pans too hard/too slow and you have to adjust the path or the easing, but doing so affects the rest of the movement, and you have to check those as well, then you have to check if everything else doesn't move. This could go on and on.

But, finalizing the camera at this phase will benefit later on, as everything that the camera won't see can be omitted from the render.

Lighting and Lightning(s)

The environment is stormy seas, foggy, semi-twilight and with cloud cover, not total darkness, so there are still natural light source passing through the clouds and from the horizon.

However, given the scale of the scene, it is not possible to cover the sky with volumetric clouds (we'll get there in Volumetrics), because it will make render time infinitely long.

Some cheating has to be made, and my solution is multiple lights, and multiple suns.
Starting from sun, which is set up through World Properties. This is where you set up environment/background/sky texture. My trick is to put the sun on the horizon, make it dim, and completely mute the colors.

Here's my settings:


Next I add some smoke/noise details using Noise Texture:


To add the second sun, use the Mix function, add another Sky Texture, and adjust the sun's position on the shader editor:


I also added some star texture and using another Mix function:


For lights, I put them in specific places over the water so I can have specular reflection on the water on specific shots. These aren't visually accurate, but like the stars, I put it there for variety and visual eye candy.


The other lights I use are port/starboard indicator, just a simple Point light with red and green colors:


I don't know if these suppose to light these up during combat, but I just like the look of small lighting additions.

And now the Lightnings.

These are basically super bright Point light that appears briefly. Just like lights, I put them where I want them to appear on the shot, and then keyframed the Power so it goes from 0, to 10 Gigawatts, to 0 again in a few frames


I synced the lightnings to the music, as per usual.

Rain Effect

I use this tutorial to make rain effects. Adjust Emission number and size of the emitter so it is always in the frame of the camera. It can get heavy so once you're satisfied with the look it can be turned off in the viewport.


Mine had about 400k particles lasting the entire intro sequence.

Fog Effect

This is another very important visual element for this project. It adds atmosphere, depth, and diffuses distance objects so everything doesn't look too clean and sterile. And its very simple to do aswell with this tutorial here. Here's a comparison:
Without fog:


With fog:

Volumetrics

Finally we come to the fun part of playing with 3D, volumetric objects. These can be static (Clouds) or animated (Waves, muzzle flash) that when implemented properly, gives that CG spectacle.

For the clouds, I use this Free VDB cloud pack, and spammed it everywhere on the scene. Well, only on places where its visible to the camera and/or necessary to manipulate the lighting.


These clouds will naturally appear dark as theres no light source, but after you put lightnings in, it'll look exactly how it suppose to.
How it normally look:


With lightning:


You can see the difference that clouds does to background scenes:



Small note: Ocean still have repeating patterns, which shouldn't happen according to the ocean tutorial from earlier. This could be either an error on my end, or it just doesn't work on dark environment.

Either way, this won't be apparent once you add fog, clouds, and most importantly, motion blur, later on rendering phase.

Now for the smoke, wave and muzzle flash effects generated from the ship, those are animated volumetric objects. It has to be tailored to the action, and the program I use to make them is Embergen, which has 14 days free trial, so I'm just making the most out of it until it expires lol. Here's the tutorial on how to use them.

The smoke from the smokestacks are the standard smoke with normal buoyancy.


The bow waves are also smoke, but with colliders put it, so the "waves" split between in creating a quasi-bow waves.


I use an existing preset for the bow waves, aptly named "Fake Smoke Water".
With that same preset I also generate the stern waves.


Once imported to the scene, adjust the size and position, set the animation starting frame, then parent them to the ship.


Make sure the duration of the exported VDB is enough for its screen time.

Pictures speaks for itself. Without volumetric objects:


With volumetric objects:


And I know, this isn't how waves look in real life, if you look hard enough they will look off, but it saves resource and time, and gets the job done. There's nothing wrong with taking the path of least resistance, especially if its your first time wandering to this industry.

For the muzzle explosion, I create 4 sphere emitters, each with a very brief (0.15ms) emitter duration, a negative buoyancy so the blast goes up, and 10hz timestep so it goes really quick.

Here's how the end result look:


And here's the tutorial on how to import and add the volume shading for the smoke/explosion.

Now make 4 copies, scale/rotate/position them in front of the barrels, parent them to the ship, and set the starting frame to the exact time when the gun fires.


Not gonna lie, you could spend hours playing with volumetric effects, either to get the look you want, or exploring other possibilities. 

Rendering

Now that you gone through all of those setup, trial and error, and technical difficulties, it is time to render them out. And no, it is not as straightforward as pressing render and wait couple of days.

I'm using Blender Cycles. It came with the program and the go to choice for realistic look. It has GPU compute, that gives faster render time and previews. I have a 3080, and I'm glad I picked it up, because it is a lot faster than CPU rendering, and has been instrumental on making all my previous videos a reality.

Even so, I still have to make compromises when rendering, as it'll be rendering hundreds of frames and I still need the computer for other things. I'm rendering in 21:9 aspect ratio at 2560x1080, and needed reasonable time/frame.

This is my render settings:


These are using Experimental feature set, and have lower settings than default, particularly the Volume Step Rate Render, Max Steps, Dicing Rate, Offscreen Scale, and Max Subdivs. But I have observed that it doesn't really affect the resulting image that much (Read: Worth the improved render time), because of one of render settings: Motion Blur.

This is the most important setting to enable when you're rendering animation. It enhances the magnitude of every fast movements, and helps to mask off details, that allows you to use lowered settings as some detail won't be seen when the camera is moving (like the smoke and the fake "waves"). So, don't forget to enable it.


Higher Shutter will give you more blur, so play around the value to get the look you wanted.

Without motion blur:


With motion blur:


The result is a more "proper" looking animation instead of a "high fidelity" one. But that's fine for the look I'm going for.

Do some single frame render on various shot to verify that everything looks exactly like you wanted, before rendering the entire scene. Or you can render it it half or 1/4 of the resolution for fast previews.

After rendering is complete, you can import the animation to your favorite video editor and add post processing/color correction.

Closing Words

Congrats, you made it to the end (be it through actual reading or pressing 'End' on the keyboard). Thank you for checking out this walkthrough, and I hope this will inspire and get you interested on the amazing world of CG graphics, and how its applied to this naval themed intro. This includes all the cheats and shortcuts I use, because well, I'm still an amateur myself, working alone, through tutorials I watch on YouTube in my spare time, and having bigger fish to fry in real life.

Still, this kind of video, while being a visual spectacle that has eclipsed my previous uploads, is highly unsustainable. The video itself is not monetized, like most of my uploads, due to my creative choice of not giving a damn about copyright and video duration. This is why I'm really thankful on having a Patreon page, and I thank all the Patrons who have been supporting the production of my contents.

Now with all of that said, its time for me to "recover" from this production. More "grounded" contents, and stop glossing over the earnings I earn from YouTube (Read: Fancy renders needs a break)

Thanks for reading and hope you have a great day ))