7 - Tank vs C4

In this scene the Engineer decides to drive a tank to crush his enemies. I like this scene because it’s full of dynamic elements, which would have been impossible to make if I had not succeeded to port the map to Blender.

Engineer taking a tank

This shot is a reference to the famous “Oh, you’re approaching me ?” meme from Stardust Crusaders.

It’s a bit difficult to replicate exactly the camera effect on the original manga panel, but a camera with a very short focal length (here 12.5 mm) does the trick. In real life, with such a lens, you would likely get distortion effects.

Forefront doesn’t have any in-game animations when you enter a vehicle, so I just did this stupid shot where the Engineer A-poses into the tank, and the tank sort of… bounces ? To get this effect I used a Maintain volume constraint on the tank’s root bone and I animated its scale.

Humvee

This shots shows a humvee covered in C4 attacking the tank, which is a technique sometimes used in Forefront (with much less C4 though). To place the C4 I used a scatter on surface modifier on the exterior of the Humvee.

The Rigacar rig makes the wheel rotate when you move the vehicle, which is very useful.

Tank shell

The tank shell is actually an anti-air missile, as I didn’t find another appropriate model in the game.

This scene was made with a single blend file, and having to manage the focal point of the camera manually would have been difficult, so I used an Empty object as the focus target.

Having it parented to multiple objects would have been complicated, so I animated it by hand in this shot so that it would match the position of the tank shell.

When the shell hits the car, it glides under it and ends up hitting a pipeline in the background. For the effects, I used some sparks from the game files, as well as a Point light with a noise modifier on its Power parameter.

I actually had this happen to me several times when I was playing the game, which gave me the idea for this scene. I don’t even understand how it can even happen. (Skill issue.)

Explosion

The C4 creates an explosion so huge it affects the entire map. For this effect, I used a simple emissive Icosphere and animated this scale.

This is also a reference to Code Lyoko’s “return to the past” scenes.