We are building all sorts of 3d models throughout our years in business, and making technical models is no new challenge to us, a couple of months ago one of our clients, Fox Art asked us in behalf of Honeywell to make one of their flagship jet engines in 3d animation to be featured in a trade show this year. This isn’t the first engine we built for them, but the third so we relished the challenge.

We were tasked to make this powerful jet engine animated in 3d in a dynamic way sort of making it cool in the presentation, Honeywell wanted the engine to break apart in mid air and dissect each part to highlight details making their proprietary features stand out.

Our workflow began with the jet engine itself and with the client’s help providing references from pictures, technical drawings, and supplying CAD models this is where the action begins. There are few challenges that we have faced building technical models such as missing parts from the original CAD models so we have to create each part from scratch following closely with the technical drawings and making sure they are in a precise measurement to fit with the existing parts. In the image below we show how we carefully follow technical drawings in multiple views to create the internal parts for the TFE.

With the client’s approval we then proceeded with the mood boards where the overall ambiance of the scene would be decided for the final animation. We presented ideas where we thought it might look like modern and parts well presented throughout the video, ideas like in the early stages shown in the image below.

For the animation the engine floats in mid air inside an empty hangar and all actions happen at the same spot, later the client decided to abandon the duo tone style and suggested that we make the surrounding a much darker ambiance and the image below was the result of the look of which everyone agreed with.

The animation was plain and simple: a few rotations, then focus and highlighting each part. Finally, we show the “break up” in Transformer style which turned out really cool. The final compositing involves various layers to achieve the final look.

It took 13 different shots to capture each angle and to put them together in the final composition, which made the animation match up to the original script. The animation was less than 2 minutes but the action was maintained by combining cool sound effects and mixing pre-composed music in the background.

This project was really a blast for the PerspectX team and we are still pushing much bigger ideas to create stunning presentations like this. We hope we can post the full video in a few weeks once the client is done with the trade show so for now we are posting a few clips from the animation.