Behold My creation!

Turning Your Car into a Helicopter... for dummies...

Well, Macgyver obviously won that fight, so it looks like i'm going down the route of the 80's movie.


However, there's one key sequence in the film that will require some out of the ordinary FX sequences, I figured it would make sense to make sure these are doable before I commit to the film.


The film will mainly focus on the two shows, "Knight Rider" staring David Hasstlehof. Featuring a crime fighter and his talking car.

And Airwolf, Starring Jean-Michael Vincint and Eernest Borgnine , an action show featuring a super Helicopter. 

Naturally I have a car at my disposal, my own SEAT Ibiza, while not quite a Black Trans-Am, it will still make an amusing replacement for the film. The real challenge will be how I incorporate an Airwolf like craft into the film. One possibility was to have two separate vehicles for the main character to use allowing him to jump from one to the other during the film. This was cool, but these shows had always been about the one craft, treating it like an extra character, so this left me with option 2.

Make the car transform into a chopper...

Airwolf was designed by Andrew Probert (who I was lucky enough to chat with back in 2007 during my A-level Art Dissertation) based on an existing Bell Helicopter, the idea being, with it's guns retracted Airwolf would look just like a normal executive copter, "A wolf in sheep's clothing"

http://www.probertdesigns.com/#!

The Additions Probert made to the un-modded bell where interesting, primarily adding the two massive engine intakes on the sides to make it a faster meaner craft. I decided to use this same approach with my Seat.

It would be easy to simply just copy Airwolf and just tack helicopter bits onto the car with little thought other than that they looked cool, however I wanted to create something that would look like it was designed together with the car and seamlessly blended in as the car transformed. Interestingly, both designs already shared the same grove on the bonnet.

I started with a really basic 3d model of a Seat Ibiza mark 3 (mine is a mark 4) i got off the internet. It wasn't too hard to replace sections and  upgrade it like mine.

Another thing I established early on was that I didn't want the car to outright transform as that wouldn't look terribly feasible. (Bearing in mind Both Airwolf and KITT had to actually do a lot of the things they did on screen in some capacity.

I came up with the idea that the helicopter section is a separate unit that could fly over when summoned and dock with the car creating the entire aircraft. This would also help retain the recognisable features of the Seat Ibiza while at the same time make it look far more advanced.

Just like Probert did with Airwolf, I added Large intakes to the side, this helps give an added sense of power to the craft.

I added a large swept back tail section to balance off the massive intakes.

I then rescaled the intakes and the fins to make the craft yet more balanced, and added running lights to the wings for added realism.

As reluctant as I was to break the shape, I felt I had to include the Rotor blades and properly make the car a Helicopter.

And thats the basic shape done. A few details to add, but they can come later :)

Decisions Decisions

End of year projects finally starting up and I'm at a loss on what script I'm going to do.
At the end of the day it boils down to a dramatic character revelation involving a Yeti, or an 80s action film featuring homages to all the best shows of the 80s.

Well theres only one way to settle this... Fight!!!

It other news, I did some more Art, Enjoy.