This series began as something that was meant to be light-hearted, and not taken very seriously… especially since I’m not the best video editor or aviation expert, and realize my videos may only appeal to a very tiny niche (perhaps just myself and my imaginary friend)… but thought I’d try sharing one link here and see if it gets any traction. My channel on YouTube (originally set up for a failed drone videography channel) has been shadow banned, but it’s also very possible my videos are just as equally mind-numbingly boring… I concede it’s probably more the latter.
This episode departs from Western Nebraska, and lands Jackson Hole, Wyoming… visiting Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse Monument, Devils Tower, and Old Faithful along the way… using dead-reckoning / pilotage; which is kind of hard to demonstrate in a video without becoming too tedious. Hopefully not too much of a copyright infringement using a character from “Airplane!”.
My plan is to implement celestial navigation with landing (to refuel) on moving aircraft carriers when crossing the Pacific. Yes, I know carriers don’t carry 100LL avgas normally… but neither do they usually let Cessna 310s land on their decks, either.
I may post a couple previous episodes–first two show a little comparison with Flight Simulator II flown on a Commodore 64 emulator. (The first simulator and computer I played on).
@N6722C Thanks! Yeah, Otto is probably not an inherently British character, but thought a mix between the typical documentary being narrated by someone with a British accent, and a little dry humor might lend itself that way. Then again, this voice was the only one I liked from what the AI had pre-generated; which happened to be British. Ha.
@BachFrosch85590 Thank you for the encouragement. Yeah, I hoped maybe I’d try to offer a little tidbit of not-well-known information on otherwise very well known famous sites.
I tried some mobile apps like “my talking pet” but too low resolution output, but otherwise very nicely animated with natural fascial expressions (not just mouth movement). Tried other web based applications like D-ID, but it wouldn’t recognize Otto’s face as a real face (probably due to his face being somewhat occluded–I didn’t want to use a view looking straight back at him–can’t see scenery in the background that way). So, I ended up using Cartoon Animator… which lets you map features of a face semi-auto-manually. Does a fairly good job animating the mouth to an mp3 file… the rest of the movement has to be done manually, like eye blinking, eyebrows moving, etc. I don’t have it down very well yet, (my rigging needs improvement as well) but I was just happy to figure out how to get it to do that much as the software is unlike anything I’ve ever used before, and I pretty much just stumbled my way through it.
That’s a good idea btw… I should have Otto do all the radio calls. Even if he calls himself captain, he’s in the right seat after all.
Is that you, ElectronVolt (from flightsim.to creator of the virtual sextant)? Ha. You got me there about the preflight planning… I need to change that verbiage to just saying, “not paying much attention to the weather forecast and regulations”. Sorry to disappoint you there–it would indeed be interesting to try celestial navigation without any pre-planning, but I’m not up to that task. Takes me almost an hour just to get ready for the next fix, much less try to plan all the waypoints to take readings, and a possible landfall procedure.
