In Search Of: Good WWII airplane models
Tobor
Posts: 2,300
I'm doing a commercial project involving some artwork of World War II airplanes. Daz doesn't have any, and some others on a few of the"meanstream" 3D sites are of fairly low quality.
I've located a set of pretty good ones on ShareCG, but the member who offers them does not license his work for commercial renders. I've found a site (Schell's Armour) that has some of what I need, but not all of them. I have not purchased any yet, so I don't know what the quality is. The models need to stand up to some foreshortened closeups.
So I was wondering if anyone had some ideas for accurate airplanes in use during WWII by US, Japan, England, and Germany. I'm looking mainly for the identifiable ones, like Spitfire, Mustang, Corsair, Hurricane, B-17, Zero, M109, etc. They do not have to be free, but they shouldn't be $50 a pop, either. Texturing should be good, and ideally, without nose art (I may have to remove it if they used authentic period art -- copyright issues).
Also looking for a good assortment of propeller blur props for 2 to 4 blade propellers. I could make them, but it would be nice to have something in-the-can. I've found a few freebies, but always looking for others.
These will render in D|S using Iray (so, no motion blur capability ... yet).
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Im sorry I forget the guys name but theres a guy on Sharecg and I think his kast name starts with an N...and he has alot of em and they are excellent.
Enjoy
Right. He (Neil) doesn't allow commercial renders.
Thanks, anyway, though.
Yeah, for a commercial project, you will probably have to purchase legit models, partiocally for the quality you are looking for. try Turbosquid, http://www.flatpyramid.com/, http://humster3d.com/, or https://www.cgtrader.com/
Renderosity has a lot of the models you listed, all at IMHO very moderate prices. A couple on your list are pretty old but not too bad if you don't want closeups. Their new interface is a bit of a pain in the anatomy, but if you can select Departments at the top and drill down the side listing through 3D Props>Transportation>Air you'll get the right category. I think.
Can't remember about nose art, but many of them do have some built-in capability or other for doing propeller blur. I think they all have moveable bits like undercarriage and control surfaces, but watch out for weird stuff like ailerons rigged as elevators and/or vice versa, and/or reversed.
The only one on your list I haven't been able to find yet is any mark of Spitfire; I do have one from somewhere else, but it's another freebie with a non-commercial-use limitation.
Chris does pretty good work...(Schell's).
Let me see what I have.
This is Schell's Huey Cobra...a 15 min Luxrender run, not mch done, other than convert to Lux materials and slap up an HDRI for light.
I have a Spitfire from Rendo, and a couple of others. Several are okay, and others will have to be background props only. A user by the name of willo on ShareCG has a Spit wth no licensing restrictions. It'll also work for what I'm doing.
Schell's models seem a pretty good deal -- a bunch of 'em for under $30. Turbosquid, CGTrader, and their lot are too expensive for this project, My total budget for models is $100, and that doesn't include the ones from Rendo I've had for since forever.
Thanks for the suggestions, though. I may have other projects down the road with a bigger budget to afford the higher-end models. D|S is somewhat limited in importing some of the file formats they use, though. LW-who? 3D-what? D|S doesn't know these exist. I end up having to trip these through a converter, and invariably I lose things. Or, ahem, do them in Poser...
Not bad! Realistic rivets ... that's what I'm looking for in the body covering. The canopies have to be decent, too. Most important is that the MATs have to be dead-on accurate for the era. A bent-up alternate propeller would be nice. I can add soot and flame from a shot-out engine.
...yeah, IP tends to scuttle a lot of ideas I have as I cannot afford the prices at the pro content houses either.
Even then, you still have to look at all the fine print of the licencing agreement. A good number of "royalty free" models on Turbosquid have what is called an "Editorial" provision which only allows news services and news publications to freely use the model.without royalties or special permissions for "editorial" use only. (such as for a news story or documentary). This is often the case with a model that is an exact 3D reproduction of an item which carries a distinct "brand name" or trademark like say, Steinway or Boeing. Some products do mention that for commercial or game purposes, you can always contact the party which owns the IP. That is not the modeller, but the actual company who's product the model represents..
For example, were I to use the Kawai EX Grand Piano model for even just a single a concert hall scene in my story, I would have to contact Kawai Pianos for permission. If they agreed, that could be a rather expensive proposition in and of itself in either an up front fee or royalty agreement in addition to the cost of the mesh. If I went ahead and used it without securing that permission, I could be in serious hot water with their legal department.
Yeah...no 3ds or Lightwave direct, but I've been having good results using Blender for conversions. That's one nice thing about Turbosquid...they are usually available in whatever format you need.
Chris started with ship models, more or less...and is a bit of a WWII buff, so his WWII planes are probably better than the free Huey.
PoserWord have a P51 mustang, you need to sign up for a subscription (which gives you access to all their 2000+ models), but these are very cheap, a 1 week subscription is just 10$, and after the sub runs out you still retain the usage rights of anything you have downloaded in that period. Their usage rights are very generous, I think you can even use them in 3D games now (not 100% sure about this), but you can certainly use them for any commercial renders. Poserworld also have a Lancaster bomber.
Looking through my collection of WWII plane 3D models I have a number of free models, but pretty much all of them say non-commercial use only, so I suspect you will need to buy the ones you need. As mentioned above there are some on Renderosity that are pretty cheap. Check out thunderr there, he has a few WWII models, and some of them include hangars and other airfield models if you need these.
Invest in a modeling app. Most let you convert to other formats easily. I have so many installed, it's usually not a problem, carrara is good for that, also poser. A good free converter is Noesis, does a great job of handling LOTS of different formats and it also handles textures.
This is probably one reason a lot of the free models on ShareCG have non-commercial licenses. They are concerned about the implications of "licensing" an object for which they didn't design themselves. I don't question their rationale, but do follow it, as a courtesy to the artist.
In the case of military or historical objects, there are decades of decided entertainment business law that's pretty clear what you can and should not do. It's minutiae, and not everyone is familiar with it. I've had to deal with it for years. For example, the B-17 wirhout emphasis on the Boeing brand may be depicted in historical representations, such as movies, TV shows, contemporary photographs of the era, fictionalized art, and so on. The design of the plane itself enjoys no copyright or trademark. Any design patent, should there have been one (and doubtful there was), is long expired.
Nose art and unique painting schemes are another matter. Though the copyright laws of the time provided no protection unless a facsimile of the art was physically registered with the Copyright Office, out of respect for the original artists I don't use it unless express permission is obtained (and these days, for WWII, it's a foregone conclusion it won't be, due to the span of years). In my experience, few if any of the military aircraft in WWII used trademarked painting schemes, as would be the case in depicting modern day commercial airliners that belong to a particular airline fleet.
My intended use is in fact editorial, so I could probably get away without additional licensing.
True, but that's beside the point. Don't give Daz any more reason to not directly supporting two of the most common 3D formats, LWO and 3DS. The problem is, there's no such thing as lossless conversion. It's always better to import an object directly.
There's going to be a conversion whatever happens, whether it is done in a modeller or in DS. Having direct import of those formats would be a (great) convenience, but it wouldn't be a protection agaisnt the vagaries of the conversion process.
You're right -- when they offer all those formats, most of them are conversions. Except that LWO and 3DS are more likely original formats, as they are common among the professional modelers. For textured objects 3DS is what my CAD program saves to, and when I use D|S, I always have to convert it first. All the converters out there are generic -- a converter built into D|S would convert to native geometry without an intermediate step, and therefore lessen the risk of losing more resolution than necessary, or needlessly applying settings contrary to the needs of D|S.
...some are also available in textured .obj format