Take a few minutes to watch this trailer for a book called Mustang.
It may be tempting to assume that this came out of some professional production house, but what you’ll find is that the creator, Grant Hobbs, spent most of his time in a makerspace to create this.
There is of course a healthy dose of special effects in this video, but Grant set out to create the entire cockpit as a practical effect. He spent a considerable amount of time and effort at the Dallas Makerspace building this rig that allowed his cockpit to not only look fantastic, but also to move allowing for more natural looking responses from the pilot.
Before this project, I had never designed anything on this scale, had no experience with CAD, had never picked up a welding torch, and just generally didn’t know what I was doing—so I think it is a huge testament to the opportunity provided by makerspaces and the strong community at Dallas Makerspace that I was able to pull this off.
Grant really went over the top for this project. If you watch closely, you’ll notice the gauges are moving in the interior shots. This is because he went through the effort of creating an ipad controlled system run by an arduino so he could coreograph the gauges to match what motion he had in the story!
You can find more information on the digital side of his creation at Blendernation.
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