August 15, 2025
by Denise Angelica Clave
The first thing one can notice entering the simulator room is the iconic flight simulator. (Well, there are three of them. This should have been “Flight simulators”, plural.) They’re so popular that there’s an entire club formed around them! I never actually signed up for the club, though — just letting you all know it’s a thing should you be interested in checking it out.
Either way, the flight simulator units are the staple for [[Animation Theory in Flight]], the hit new subject that’s all about animating flight, especially for aircraft. We did get to try them out, but the helicopter variant was out of order at the time. (They’re probably not the main course for the subject anyway.) Not to mention that, for anyone who thinks flight isn’t their forte — myself included — flight controls are a whole new world.
There’s a lot to set up before taking off. Starting the engine, flipping switches on the left hand, making sure some indicators are up, setting power on the lever, so on and so forth… and once all’s set, carefully pull the yoke for take-off.
Now, for the flight controls. You have the rudder controls on the pedals, and two other controls on the yoke. Steer for the ailerons, drag for the elevators. Simple as that, right? I found that my first few attempts ended up with the plane stalling, though I only ever attempted to land a few times.
Contrary to popular belief (at least on my end) and how the yoke’s so similar to a steering wheel, you can’t steer like you would on land by also steering the yoke. Also, so as not to have too much overlap with the brakes, you need only step to control the rudders, while braking is tucked away by actually pushing both pedals. You wouldn’t want to make your aircraft roll over there, if the forces on land allow for that, would you?!
And right off the bat, you may have noticed that we’re definitely considering the three axes this time. Perfectly timed as well, as one of our major subjects has us learning Blender. In a way, at least we’ll have “accurate flight animations” as a takeaway by the time we’re done with this. In fact, I did wind up practicing 3D animation on the side, and thus, most of what I’ve submitted on the subject is in 3D.
But it doesn’t matter if you’ll be submitting in two or three dimensions. What matters is that we get some time to practice and refine our animations, while wrapping around our heads just to make sense of this bizarre crossover. Really, we’re just hoping this event will be worth the bundles of animations for a domain we otherwise know little about.
Anyway, this one might be part of a series. Not that we’re expecting that much variety these days, as I’ve been struggling to think of a topic, yet it’s about time your resident IDT representative talks about the other side of the horizon, eh? This “Subject Review” part may span two parts at least, yet the overarching “crossover” theme remains for most, if not all, of the semester.