refrences

Here is my reference list to create my animation.

http://leonardo-da-vinci.paintings.name

http://painting.about.com/.../famouspainters/...paintings/Leonardo-Mona-Lisa.htm

http://painting.about.com/od/artglossarys/g/bldefsfumato.htm

http://www.leonardo-da-vinci-biography.com/leonardo-da-vinci-anatomy.html

http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/featuresleonardo/parachute.html

http://www.da-vinci-inventions.com/parachute.aspx

http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/leonardo/glider.html

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blearlyflight.htm

http://sped2work.tripod.com/leoglider.html

here I added a biped to my glider to make it more realistic when flying. To do this I added a biped to my environment and then linked it to the glider so when the glider banks left or right the biped's arms and legs stay in the right place of the glider.

 

Path Constraints

Here I have used the line tool to create a flight path for my glider to follow.

As you can see the glider is set to the begining of the white line and will finish at the end. I used different camera angles for the different scenes in my animation.

Flowing water using particle systems

For this technique I used the particle systems tool. First I created a box or a plane which I linked the gravity and the Udeflector tool too. Once I did that I added the super spray particle system tool to the box and changed the levels in the particle generation to make it look like water.

As you can see the water flows out of the superspray tool and the gravity and Udeflector tools work to make the water flow downwards and stay ontop of the box.

Terrain modelling

I decided to model an environment (terrain) for my glider to fly around. To do this I created a plane which I made a smoke map and incresed the size to 185, once I did this I added a displace modifier to it and increased the strength to 400 to create a terrain texture.

Once I did this I created another plane which I made into water and added to the terrain to make it look like a lake. I also added a grass texture to the terrain to make it look like hillsides.

I also added a sewer pipe which will have water flowing out of it in my animation. I feel this has created a nice environment for my glider to fly around and has taught me usefull techniques for creating environments.

Da vinci Glider

Here is my glider with material added to it and the wings mapped with a material editor. I feel I can improve on the wings of my model but I will use this as a guideline to improve on.

To create this I used simple cylinders and torus's to odel the structure. For the wings I used a plane the same way I used for the leaf tutorial and then mapped a fustian texture to it as that is the material Da Vinci would of used.

I also mapped a maple wood texture to the structure as that was a commonly available wood during the 15th Century.

Humanoid

Here I have created a huimanoid model that will sit within the glider and show how the glider would have been used. 

To do this I used the male biped tool to create my model and then changed the colour to a skin colour. I found this a very usefull tool and think that when animating my model this will make it alot easier to do. 

I am going to add a humanoid body to this to make it look more realistic this model is a tester for my glider model. I feel this will make the final animation alot easier as my glider is designed so that the user would actually flap the wings up and down to keep an extended glide.