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Green screen mode

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Green screen mode

Postby daveculp » Wed Nov 15, 2017 5:21 am

I'm reading a book about some true events that took place featuring a US Navy squadron during the Korean War, and it got me thinking about movie adaptations and how badly Hollywood screws up the flight dynamics in CGI depictions of aircraft. I was thinking that if FlightGear had a green screen mode then it could possibly be used to provide better flight dynamics for the movie biz. I don't have any experience with green screen, but I think for FlightGear it would mean that anything that isn't the user aircraft would be rendered a plain green color.
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Re: Green screen mode

Postby LesterBoffo » Wed Nov 15, 2017 5:48 am

daveculp wrote in Wed Nov 15, 2017 5:21 am:I'm reading a book about some true events that took place featuring a US Navy squadron during the Korean War, and it got me thinking about movie adaptations and how badly Hollywood screws up the flight dynamics in CGI depictions of aircraft. I was thinking that if FlightGear had a green screen mode then it could possibly be used to provide better flight dynamics for the movie biz. I don't have any experience with green screen, but I think for FlightGear it would mean that anything that isn't the user aircraft would be rendered a plain green color.


My gripe about Flyboys was the fact the American "Lafayette' squad's pilots were climbing and diving their Nieuport 11's like they were WWII era fighters. The Nieuport was nimble, but could rarely exceed anything more than 600 FPM in an optimum climb at 50~60 knots from ground to 6000'. And they had a bad habit of shedding their lower sesquiplane wings if dived at over 150 MPH. Who ever invisioned that film, ( and according to the special features they bothered to get flights in replica WWI planes to get the 'feel'.) but apparently it didn't make the cut for gripping action.


In a modern film industry where J.J. Abrams type of shaking the heck out of the camera to make the view look exciting is the norm, will being accurate about CGI flying dynamics ever catch on?
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Re: Green screen mode

Postby Gijs » Wed Nov 15, 2017 8:42 am

Reminds me of this creative use of FlightGear :-) Was actually brought up on the forum earlier this year: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=31600 What you're imagining is sort of the opposite.



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Re: Green screen mode

Postby curt » Wed Nov 15, 2017 2:33 pm

I've always thought we could at least export the flight path and orientations to the fancy hollywood render farm, but maybe that's not exciting enough either. Reminds me of a story one of the original flightgear founding consultants shared once. I'll probably get all the details wrong, but let me try to remember it. This one dutiful flight simulation engineer (let's call him Steve) worked on a boring high end military training sim. One day management decided the sim needed to become more exciting so it could potentially be marketed to the entertainment industry. So they brought in a 'fun' consultant. This consultant evaluated the sim and immediately determined all the enemy planes were too small. They needed to at least double in size. So ... ok, Steve and his team did their duty and doubled the model size of all enemy aircraft. The consultant came back to check on their work and said, yes, yes, this is a good start, but now it feels like the airplanes are moving too slow for their size, we need to double their airspeed. So the team set off to work on doubling the airspeed for all the enemy planes. The consultant came back again to check on their work ... and blew a gasket when he discovered the team and undone all his recommended changes. Well Steve and team defended themselves and explained that by doubling the speed of the aircraft, they now moved twice as far away, and looked the same size as before, and I'm sure they added a comment on how entertaining the whole process had been. Finally in the end, the 'fun' consultant got the boot, and the dev team altered the AI rules for enemy planes to encourage them to fly closer in.

I like this story because it is a 'fun' analogy that you don't always get what you intended when you start making changes to things. Often you discover there's a little more going on than you thought ... but if you can turn that into a learning process then it's all good.
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Re: Green screen mode

Postby erik » Thu Nov 16, 2017 2:18 pm

There are better ways to make a simulation fun: https://www.snopes.com/humor/nonsense/kangaroo.asp
But this is getting slightly off-topic.

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