Since I discovered this fascinating flying machine I was thrilled by both its elegance and its futuristic look. The WWA 14 was built in 1972 by the Berijev Aircraft Company with Robert Bartini as the lead engineer. It combined the speed of a jet with the air cussion technique of a hovercraft. The so called ecranoplan would cruise just above sea level with a speed of 720 km/h.  

Showing soviet technique that could potentially used for military purposes is not exactly a contribution to world peace these days. Anyway I hope that you share my fascination for this outstanding project. 

I modelled the fuselage along with the big monowing and the lateral bodies in Cinema 4D R25 as one single piece in order to get that roundish streamline shape. Wings, rudder, elevator and jet engines were built seperately. 

Three machines of that type were built, only one took off the ground. In the beginning, the WWA14 was equipped with a quite remarkable landing gear, so I decided to model this as well. In the further process I took it off again, but I kept the strange capsules of the nose gear and the side gear.  

The texturing was done in Adobe Substance Painter. Its remarkable realistic looking grunge maps helped a lot to get a worn metallic surface. All rivets were painted by hand (it must have been thousands and thousands) in both the height and the normal channel. Later all channels were exported in a seperate folder and used as material textures for the redshift renderer.

For the lighting I switched back to Cinema 4D. I used redshift, because its options so set up a realistic lighting are simply fantastic. I used a dome light, which is almost obligatory when you want to light a threedimensional mirror like this metal plane. The nice reflexions come from an additional sun light source.  

I could have used an old hangar environment as a stage for the plane, but I felt it needed more action and drama. So I used this stock image and combined it with a cloudy sky, painting a sunny spot into the clouds and onto the water in oder to match the sun position of the rendering. 

The Photoshop work did not take long, I used it primarily for color grading.