I am extremely happy to see the reaction to Air Duel, my iClone5 demo, which has been met with positive comments and some questions. Do to time constraints I cannot give a full tutorial but I can tell you:

• How it was made in general.
• Scene Setup
• Toon Render and Post Effect Settings
• Animating with paths.
• Using the stock destructible prop for debris.
• Summary of the MoCap and clean up.

So let's start with the some general information about the production which you will discover contains only one slightly complex timing scene and the rest is up to iClone or the fantastic props of the World War II Packs. Those props are of course a vital part to this production but any airplanes that can be converted to iClone via 3DXchange or other methods will work. If you want to take the quick and easy route you can make a propeller out of a thin cylinder with the right opacity then animate with the Prop Puppet feature, even a clear flat static cylinder is better than a frozen prop.

In actuality we have the Private character from the 101st Airborne wearing a Tank Commander helmet flying the P51. The opposing force in the ME-109 is the Wehrmacht Sergeant wearing Super Hero gloves and a gawd awful leather helmet that I made in Studio Max. The scene consists of a cylindric floor with a Photoshop'd Google map applied as a texture. The sky is the stock sky Clear Day 01.

The image above shows the basic scene with the floor and sky props loaded followed by the same scene with the Toon Render and Post Effects applied.

Even though the terrain was altered to remove the labels it is still the original color. We don't have to desaturate or gray scale it in our image editor as iClone Post Effects will take care of that for us.

The final render "look" is achieved by turning on the Toon render in the Atmosphere section of the right menu and the proper Post Effects in the right order.