Helicopter Rotor Blades - how do you do it?

felipefrango

So there are choppers and other things with rotors in this game I'm working on. Right now I have the most obvious solution possible - a rotor mesh that spins - but it's not looking very convincing (specially since I'm sticking to a cartoonish art style). I wanna try to do something that emulates the motion blur and fits the art direction better. Thus, I wondered, how do you people do them? Either realistic or stylized, what other sorts of solutions are there?

I kinda like what they did in Battlefield Heroes, is it just a transparent plane that spins around?





[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS05-DzM_ps"]Battlefield Heroes - Helicopter - YouTube[/ame]

ZacD

In that Battlefield Heroes you can see at 12-13 seconds where it swaps the rotor model for a blurred texture on a plane. I think a simple blurred texuter plane would be fine for most uses.

felipefrango

Yeah, that was smart haha. In my game rotors will be spinning constantly so I'm not concerned with how they should look at slow speeds. Now, that being a texture on a plane, does is simply spin around at high speeds? Maybe I could make it spin slower and hide the mesh every frame or so to make it more cartoonish?

ZacD

Here's a good video that might work as reference, [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb2-o-Usgek"]Helicopter Test Number 2 with motion blur - YouTube[/ame]

I like the effect once it starts spinning fast it looks like it starts spining the other way, you can see this on car rims too.