The following pictures are examples of characters, vehicles, and
environments that were to be used in the now defunct Luftwaffe 2 animated video.

click for big versions, which will open in a new window.

MAIN CHARACTER: Dora Oberlicht

Dora was fully rigged with numerous facial expression sliders and
waaaaay too much smartsknning / crazy bones to make her pants
and shoulders work. Maybe I'll take a shot of her with her arms
raised later, just to show off the nutty lengths I went to to make it all
automatically deform nicely when dragging the arms around.
The long bottom to her coat was also a crazy challenge, as I didn't want to
do it with the cloth wizard and rigged up a system to deform it with bones.

Here are some video examples of Dora in action,
all Divx encoded .avi around 1.2MB in size

Facial test (quick rendered, to show expressions)
Hand test
Walk cycle

I dashed those off in a bit of a hurry when they were made, so they could
probably use a good bit of tweaking (especially the walk).

MAIN CHARACTER: Gustav Alder

Gus was not as far along in the pipeline as Dora, but he was getting there.
The full body shot shows his clothes with heavy bumpmap/ displacement
added, to increase the realism somewhat.

AIRCRAFT: Ta138 Raven

The Raven, flown by Dora, was an experimental German jet that
never made it to production in reality, but in our alternate-hisory anime
it was the premier fighter around. The cockpit was to be filled with
fully operating levers and gauges, but the gauge faces were not finished
and the levers only partially rigged up. If the project had continued though,
the whole thing would have been set up. There was also to be working
landing gear, which also was left incomplete.

AIRCRAFT: Triebflugel

Would have dropped like a lead weight if it had ever made
it past wind tunnel testing, but in alternate universes, crazy
things can happen. Like it being the star of the show, as far as
the vehicles are concerned. Landing gear is fully articulated and
opens / closes with a pose slider. The wings, which at takeoff rotate
like a helicopter blade, lock into a stable position for level flight.
The wings are also rotated / positioned using a pose slider.

ENVIRONMENTS

Just a few things I was working on as sets for the planes to fly around
above and through. The cloud was an idea I was testing. It's all geometry
with a proceedural displacement material. Surprisingly it didnt take all that
long to render. It uses some wacky toon gradients to get the shading. The
ground shot uses hair for the trees, with placement determined by a
density map decal. The clouds in that shot are particle emitter ones, which
in large quantity proved costly to render time-wise. Also, I wish there was a
setting (maybe I missed it) to get the emitter to emit once and stop... I could
come up with a bunch of other wishes about the emitter system that would
make it easier to do clouds that way. Ahh well.

all models created / textured by me, Joel Steudler