Final Major Project

Here is my week wise progress for my final major project for this course. I had decided to go ahead with the PreViz that I had done for my previous term, so most of the content is similar to what I had written in the old blog. Each week will deal with my progress to achieve a goal and the problems and fixes that I’ve encountered along the way.

For my final major project, I wanted to create a car racing short film which involved a wannabe racecar driver, taking on the infamous hot wheel’s style loop to prove his coach wrong. The main reason I chose this idea was because of how much I love cars and at the same time I wanted to test out my animation skills with dialogues and acting. I thought this would be the perfect mix to show on my portfolio for potential recruiters and also a fun watch for audiences during the post graduate showcase that we would be having at the end of the year.

Week 1

For this week, I majorly went about planning the entire production of my short film. I created a word document that listed out each phase that I had to accomplish before my end goal. I also took into consideration the feedback that I had received for my previz in the previous term.

The main feedback was that I needed to figure out a better angle of the loop because there wasn’t much suspense when the main character was upside down. Also a few suggestions on how I could add more shots of the coach while the main character is taking on the loop.

Here is how I thought I would go about planning the phases:

Builds Phase 1

Racetrack

• Watchtower
• Checkered flags
• Audience stands
• Tyres
• Garages
• Pit stop lane
• Racing academy building
• 2 cars racing
• Loud speaker phones
• 2 lane racetrack
• Stadium lights
• HDRI check

Classroom

• Coach with headset, beard and outfit
• Main student with outfit
• 2 tv screens (gifs or image visuals)
• Car racing brands
• Benches and chairs
• Extra students
• Academy sign
• entry/exit door
• Indoor lights

The Loop

• Canyon terrain
• Birds
• Loop structure
• Fencing and gates
• Do not enter sign
• Main character in racing suit
• The vehicle with lights (with rigged buttons)
• Coach in same outfit
• Extra students
• HDRI check

Texturing Phase 2

• Racetrack
• Classroom
• Loop Structure
• Coach with headset and one outfit
• Main student with two outfits, casual and racing
• Extra Students
• Vehicle
• Environment

I also rewatched few of my favorite racing films to get inspired with camera shots and animation that I could use for my very own film. I watched Turbo and Ford vs Ferrari for time being.

Week 2

The following week I decided to further plan how I would go about my project. I knew that I wanted to do the entire film in Blender because with the given time constraint and familiarity, I thought that I would be able to troubleshoot issues better and more efficiently. I did want to use Maya and Unreal Engine, but it would be a huge risk to go that route not knowing the software properly. I only knew how to animate in Maya and how to place a scene with cameras in Unreal.

Next I knew that I had to create three separate environments as I had three scenes with respect to my previz. There was the racetrack shot with the academy in the background, the classroom shot with the coach and his students and lastly, the loop shot where the character would drive his car around the loop. I decided to go step by step and start with the first shot.

I looked for a lot of references online and I found a few buildings that matched my academy building. I started with creating a basic block model of all the elements that would be placed in the scene. The main buildings were the academy itself, the racetrack, the race watchtower and audience stands. I started to model out the racetrack using a curve modifier in Blender to tweak it properly to my liking. Then I started modelling the academy building looking at the reference and lastly I created the watchtower with the audience stands in the background.

My next major task was to find the cars that would go around the track. I did not want them to be low poly even though they only would be seen from a distance. I really wanted my establishing shot to look as real as possible, but giving it a stylized feel at the same time. I did a little research on which cars to put in the scene and also how to rig them. Rigging was actually pretty simple as the wheels just needed to be parented separately. The first issue I encountered here was to make two cars follow the track’s path properly. No matter what I did, they would always glitch out and go somewhere else. This is where I feel the software I chose mattered because there were a lot of people like me trying out car related stuff and there was a huge Blender forum online. I was able to find the solution by applying location, rotation and scale for both the car rig and the curve and it was super cool to see the cars following the path I just created!

Week 3

I knew I had to add more elements into the racetrack to make it more believable, so I looked up online for more reference, this time for the obvious stuff you would find on a racetrack. This helped a lot, because I was able to place more things into the scene like tyres, cones, flags, banners, trees and more environment details that added to the scene.

For the audience stands I modelled that in detail as well, adding chairs, fencing and loudspeaker microphones. I thought about simulating an audience but that would just make the scene really heavy and I thought that it would affect my render times. Next, I had to deal with the environment effects and I thought it would be a great idea to do a flag cloth simulation on top of the watchtower building. I researched online how to do it, because I had never done any cloth simulation before, but it was pretty straight forward. I was able to add wind and bake the animation for the flag and it actually looked pretty realistic, super cool! I also added a few garages for the cars on the side of the track, but I needed to find low poly cars that had good textures to make them seem realistic.

Week 4

I started working more on the racetrack scene, especially texturing it. I started with the track to find tarmac texture for the road surface. It was pretty easy to find, but I wanted the road to have tyre marks on it, like a real racetrack would. I asked my friend who knew photoshop to try something out, but it was looking really fake. I then tried experimenting in Blender itself, using the texture paint option and I was able to get a decent output for the road texture. Next I needed to the border, the typical white and red striped racetrack border.

Once the track was done, I decided to choose a standard color tone for the entire track and that would be red, white and black. I started with the academy building, then the watchtower building and then the audience grandstands. I also finally found the lowpoly cars to add to the scene and they looked great because of the texture on top of them, they looked like real cars! Once that was done, I started to search for good tree assets that weren’t too highpoly. I was only able to find highpoly assets and they were slowing down my system a lot. I tried experimenting with alpha channels to give a transparent shader in Blender to make it look like a real tree and that seemed to work. All I needed to do was build a structure resembling a tree and then add the transparent maps to it, it worked perfectly! The last thing was to properly animate the cars going around the track. For now, I tried syncing them together, but will edit them later. My plan was mainly to get the track looking as best as I could and the animation would follow later.

Week 5

This week I wanted to finish off the racetrack scene as much as I could, because I wanted to move onto the next classroom scene. I tried to tidy up the scene as much as I could, adding detail at the right places. For example I animated the banners, added more trees to the scene and I also added a second watchtower at a lower height, so that I could add in a checkered flag that is always seen on a racecourse. I also needed to add a HDRI into the scene and I was able to find a racetrack scene during the day time on a website called polyhaven and it resembled the lighting I required for the scene as well.

Week 6

Now that the racetrack scene was more or less complete for now, I started to look for reference for the classroom scene. I could not find any racing classroom as such because the concept of a racing school does not exist apparently, although I was able to find a lot of racing academies around the world. The one that struck me was a Toyota racing academy classroom and I really liked the look and feel of it. It even matched my color theme of red, white and black, so this was the perfect reference to have. I started to do basic blocking of the classroom which were the walls, tv screen, chairs, counter top and whiteboard.

At the same time I was experimenting with render settings of the first scene. Something looked really off with the lighting because no matter how much I changed the contrast to high or low, it looked pretty much the same. That’s when I came about volumetrics, where people used a volume shader to add some kind of depth to the scene. As part of my research, I was able to find a good tutorial on Youtube which made me understand the technicality of adding a volume into the scene. It was to add a an object between the lighting source of the scene and by doing this it would only partially allow a certain amount of light into the scene. I was able to experiment with a lot of volume settings and I found a nice mix, so that it looked like there was fog in my scene, I was amazed at how just a cube made so much difference to my scene!

Week 7

For this week, one major thing that I had forgotten to finalize was the actual characters that I needed for my film! I needed to have two main characters and a few students. Since I did my previz in Maya, the characters were rigged only for that software. I tried importing them into Blender, but I ran into a lot of issues, especially with materials and weight paint of the armature. I could not proceed and I had to start from scratch to find new characters that were Blender compatible. I started to research online to find a few free characters that were already rigged, which would save me a lot of time. I came across Blender’s official website, where they had a library of a lot of characters. I found the snow rig on there and it seemed perfect for the student, although the name Vert did not suit him. Next for the coach, I found a rig called vincent which I thought I could customize a bit so that he looked a bit older and gruffier. In my initial plan, I thought I would have two clothing outfits for the coach and two clothing outfits for the student, but I decided to proceed with only one for the coach, because the mesh was already parented and it was tough to remove parent and add new meshes. I was not too bothered about the cloth simulation of the clothes, because my main focus in the classroom scene was the acting animation and dialogue.

Now that I had these two characters, I could use them in my classroom scene, so that I could place objects to scale. This way, I knew that everything would match with respect to the character and not look fake. I continued adding elements into the scene like car logos on the walls, windows, doors, fans, ceiling and a bulletin board. I had to change a lot of things in previous scene because they did not match the scale of the characters I just put in the scene.

Week 8

This week I proceeded with the classroom scene. I started to texture the main areas like the ground carpet, tv screen, car logos and wall paint. It was finally starting to look like a racing classroom instead of normal one. I used a lot of shaders and normal maps to make the carpet material stand out a bit more. For the trophy stand, I used granite material to give it a nice look. For the ceiling I experimented with a lot of textures, because I wanted to add ceiling lights which would make my job easier when I start lighting up the scene. I thought it would be cool to add air vents in the ceiling too to add a more realistic touch to the scene. I added window glass and tv glass as well.

Next I started to work on the lighting of the scene. I carefully placed multiple area lights in the ceiling so that it matched the scale of the square that was already placed in the same spot. I added more windows to the right of the classroom, to let in a little bit of natural light. I added a sunlight and angle it towards the chairs of the classroom. I was pretty happy with the render preview and I felt the scene was in a good place for now.

I started to look for inspiration for the outfits of my character, but this was taking a long time as I had too many to choose from, I decided to start fresh again next week. My goal was to get the characters fully textured and placed in the scene in their respective poses, so that I could start recording the dialogue and then start my animation from there.

Week 9

This week I wanted to focus only on the characters, because I needed to place them in the classroom scene. I started with the student character because that was the easier one. I changed the tshirt texture a bit and added a Nike logo, to make it look like he was one of the cool kids who dressed sporty. I tried to edit his skin texture as well and I modified his hairstyle a bit. Most of my time went in exploring the rig to see how I could use it for animation. The facial rig setup was good and the body bones had both ik and fk, so that was great too. I changed up the pants and shoes too to match the color combination of the clothes overall.

For the coach, I wanted to add a beard on his face. But, the main problem I ran into was that the once I parented a beard onto the character’s face, the mouth was moving very weirdly. I realized that this would be a pretty major problem once I began lip sync for the dialogues as when the mouth moved, the beard kept intersecting with the face mesh and glitching. I tried many things like extruding the skin mesh itself and then separating it and adding a beard hair texture on top of it. Although the mouth was moving fine, the beard was looking very fake. I was on the verge of deleting the beard, because I had used up so much time to make it work. I thought I would make one last attempt at it. I modelled out a beard mesh looking at a reference and then I was able to manually weight paint each vertex of the beard to make it move exactly how I wanted it to. When I parented it to the mouth mesh, I couldn’t believe my eyes when it finally worked! I was super happy to see the result, the mouth moving along with the beard, just like how it would in real life. I added a similar texture to the hair and made it grey color to make the coach look a bit older. I also added in a headphones mesh that I found online, to give him a bit of a racing feel. I made edits to the tshirt, pants and shoes to match the color theme that I had going for the racing academy and my scene in general. I added a Ford racing logo on his shirt as well.

Week 10

Now that I had my characters ready and the classroom ready too, I felt that it was a good time to move onto the final loop scene. But, before I could do that I needed to finalize on the car that I was going to use. I had the same problem again here that I had with the characters and that was that they were Maya based and not for Blender. I had rigged the Mustang car in Maya from scratch and I realized that I had to do the same in Blender too. I decided to proceed with the same car, because it was my favorite car of all time and I had to use that. I started with researching which would be the best way to rig a car in Blender and that’s when I came across the rigacar addon. It was a free tool that could rig a car automatically, provided the nomenclature for the different car parts was correct, especially the wheels and the disc brakes. I used this add on to rig the car, and I tested the follow path constraint that I had used earlier for my racetrack scene. Although there was limited control over the car rig, this was good enough to start with and so I proceeded with the same.

My next goal was to make the car look good, because my story wasn’t just about the main character, it was about the car he drives as well. I looked up lots of reference images to see which color I could stick with. I decided to go ahead with a blue car with white stripes because that was typical original mustang car paint for the ages. Whenever I picture a Mustang somehow it is always blue. I started texturing the exterior of the car with glossy black plastic, window glass, headlight chrome and many other parts. I took a lot of time getting the right material for car paint, as it was a very complicated node structure to get the correct version of metallic paint that had noise in them. I was able to get a good output for the exterior and for next week I thought I would start with the interior.

I knew I wanted to add a nitrous scene in my film, so I wanted to model out the nitrous cannister and the flip switch. I also needed to add buttons for the steering wheel. I decided to watch the Fast and the Furious film again to see how the nitrous can was placed and how the flip switch looked like. I got a pretty fair understanding of how it should be placed and I started to model out the entire thing. I decided to place it inbetween the seats, because it would be easy to animate the driver’s hand flicking the switch, rather than him search for the cannister in the rear end of the car or under the car for that matter.

Week 11

This week I wanted to fully finish texturing the car, and that meant to start with the interior. I looked up a lot of Youtube videos to help me with this, as there were a lot of car vloggers out there who did car intro videos where they would get into the car and explain the features of the same. I paused the video at the right moments and took screenshots to properly make out which material would go where. I also took a lot of attention on detailing as I was checking what kind of leather and plastic where there inside the car. I took a lot of time figuring out the decals of the infotainment panel because of the number of stickers on there! The volume buttons, AC controls and other buttons were actually hard to deal with as I had to google images of each sticker and then remove the background so that I could use the alpha channel to set transparency in Blender to make it look like a decal.

Once the decal detailing was done, I focused on the major materials like seat and dashboard texturing. I was able to generate a normal map for the seat leather material and at the same time I tweaked the same material to get a normal map for leather plastic too. I used the former for the seats and the latter for gearbox, steering wheel, doors and dashboard. It was pretty cool to see the interiors of the car coming to life as I moved about generating each material correctly.

I also started to test out the audio that I would be using for the car stuff. I downloaded Forza Horizon 4 on my PC, because I knew that game had the exact same car that I was using. I immediately bought the car and I started doing a few trial recordings on my phone. I also used this opportunity to see how the car physics were inside the game, when accelerating, braking and taking turns. It was pretty cool to analyze everything for the first time with so much attention to detail because I had never done that before. Whenever I played a racing game, it was just to win first place every single time as fast as possible with the fastest car around.

Week 12

Now that both the car and the characters were textured and ready to a good extent, I thought it would be a good idea to go back to the classroom scene and place the characters properly before going to the loop scene. I looked at reference for a student sitting relaxed on the chair, because I needed to portray in the first scene itself that my main character was this wannabe racer with a cool attitude who wouldn’t pay that much attention in class. As for the coach, I wanted him to look assertive and aggressive and for that I thought his stance should be upright and bold to show his dominance.

Once this was done, I started to focus on the environment for the loop scene. There was not a lot of reference available for this, because every thing I thought of was pretty new. Then I remembered that there was this hotwheels movie I had watched when I was a kid and this was the perfect reference! I rewatched the entire movie, but I was able to take a lot of footage from the movie and use it as reference to model my scene. I started to model the canyons first, because I wanted to track to be on a canyon type of terrain. Next, I started to build the track on top of the canyon surface, using that as the base. Once this was set, I imported my car model into the scene to match the scale of it and to try experimenting how the car would move around the track.

Week 13

Now that I finally had the basic block out of the loop scene, I could finally start testing out the car following the path around the loop, as I remembered I had issues doing the same in Maya for my previz. I guessed right, because the moment I added a follow constraint to the car rig, it kept glitching all over the track. Especially when it came to the loop upside down part, the car wheels would go haywire and the rig would fly off the track. I tried my best to solve it, looking at Blender forums for solutions but to no avail. Nobody had rigged a car to go on loop before, looks like I was the first one. So, sadly I had to look for another rig that gave my less issues, I went back to square one where I had to either rig the car myself or find a good rig online.

That’s when I stumbled upon a new rig called launch control. This rig looked complicated, but it had a lot of precision controls I thought that I could use. I downloaded it immediately and the car was working a lot better than before, atleast it wasn’t flying around. Launch control had this ground detection plane system, so whatever I added into the collection, the car would always snap to that ground surface as it’s plane. This really helped me out as the car was staying on the track, even when going on the loop. Although there were still issues with the tyres, it looked like I could manually fix them if I spent the time and effort to do so. I checked out a lot of tutorials online, by the founder himself, and this helped me rig the car and use it to my liking.

Week 14

For this week, I wanted to focus mainly on the car animation around the track, as the car was moving properly using the follow constraint, using the new Launch Control Rig. I started with calculating the amount of time the car would take to finish the entire loop. I looked at a good YouTube video, where this stunt was actually done in real life, it was called the Double Loop Dare. I used this as reference to set the time limit and it came to about thirty seconds. So, in that time the car had to start from point A and reach point B. I started to add keyframes to check the speed of the car to see if it looked right. The car looked like it was going too fast, so I had to space out the number of keyframes to make it last longer. Now that the timing of the entire thing looked right, I could focus on adding physics to the car. Launch Control had it’s own inbuilt physics that could be generated, but when I tried using this, it was finding it very hard to calculate when going on a slope or on the loop upside down, so unfortunately I could not use this.

I had to manually animate each keyframe where I thought the vehicle would move, mainly the suspension and wheel drifting. I watched lot of movie reference for this to see how a real car would behave. In real life, a car doesn’t move that much from the outside, so I tried to exaggerate the animation a bit, just to give a visual sense of how hard it is to do the loop. It was tough to animate the jump part, because the car kept snapping back to the track when it was mid-air. Again, I had to manually keyframe each part so that it remained in the air for the entirety of the jump. It was fun to animate the landing physics as the car hit the ground hard.

Week 15

I tried to finalize the car animation as much as I could this week, because I wanted to redo to the environment a bit. To show initial acceleration of the car, I thought it would be a good idea to do a burnout. So, for this, I added a bit of wheelspin and car suspension at the beginning to make it look like one. Next i played around with the graph editor to show gradual increase of speed as the car got into the loop, then decrease as it went upside down, and then suddenly increase as nitrous would kick in. Then I gradually decreased the speed as the car landed and then drifted to the end.

Now that the car animation was more or less done, I tried to add smoke for the burnout part because I thought it would look really cool. I researched online how to do it and it showed me a tutorial wherein I could generate smoke using a particle system. I had to carefully model a seperate tyre mesh place that would emit the smoke and then create the boundary in which the smoke would generate. Once the setup was done, I had a lot of settings to tweak to make the smoke’s intensity look right and also the color and duration.

For the end drift scene, I looked at a Fast and Furious movie shot, where the car had a similar angle and I exaggerated the animation a bit to make it look fancy. If it doesn’t take too long to render, I thought I could add smoke for the last drift sequence as well, although it wouldn’t be seen as much as the first shot.

Week 16

I progressed with my loop scene by adding in more elements to make it look more fuller. I added a bit of fencing near the start of the track, added a few boards saying danger, do not enter and I tried levelling the plane on which the the track initiated. I thought it would be a good idea to add in a volume, just like I had for the first racetrack scene, and that gave a cool effect in the render preview. Furthermore, I added tiny dust particles to add more detail to the environment.

Towards the end of the track, I modelled out the canyon in such a way that the track curled around a peak of a canyon. The last thing I had to add were a few birds flying in the distance in the establishing shot in the begining. I debated which birds to use and decided to go with lowpoly as there anyway seen from a distance. I create a basic version of a bird, rigged it, textured it and duplicated the same to make a bird collection. Then I animated each of the bird’s rigs with a slight lag to give it a bit of realism. Then I placed them at a height and made them move from left to right, again with a slight lag.

I could finally bring in my coach character into the scene and I decided to place him behind the car and the main character, just like in my previz. I still didn’t have my students for the scene, so looked online on the forum for more characters. It was really hard to find matching stylized characters that fit the current ones I had. I decided to use a female character called Rain and i used the same coach character but edited him a bit to look different from the current guy. I removed his glasses, squished his face a bit, removed the skin texture wrinkles and added different colors for his clothing and eyes. Once this was done, I place both characters in the classroom scene, posed them and then appended the same rigs into the loop scene for reference and placement.

Week 17

Now that everything was slowly coming together, the last thing I needed to do was create the main characters racing costume. I looked online to find good reference and I stuck with a plain full sleeves racing suit with a helmet. The moment I saw the helmet, I realised that I had totally forgotten that pro racecar drivers always wear a helmet! I needed to confirm with George in class if I could do so, because wearing a helmet would mean that the lipsync would not be seen. But I really needed it to be there to portray the story of the character. I decided to model out the suit on top of the character by extruding the tshirt mesh and using the current skin mesh. I changed up the colors and added a pattern to give it that racing aesthetic. I added a few logos on the suit too, especially the Hothwheels logo. For the helmet, I found a basic 3D model online and then added extra detail on top of it, like the airintake, rubber lining and visor. I did similar texturing like with the suit, where I added racing colors and a lots of car branded logos.

I used this character instead and placed him the scene next to the car and the scale matched perfectly! I spoke to soon, because the moment I placed him inside the car, the arms, legs and head were all intersecting with the car mesh. I had to drop the scale of the character, to make him sit properly inside the car without any intersection. The difference wasn’t noticeable, so i decided to proceed with this arrangement. I tested out how to parent the character rig to the car rig to match the physics of the car and it was pretty straightforward. All I had to do was parent the character rig to the main car body. I could finally start animation next week as all three of my scene were complete to a good extent.

Week 18

I was excited for college to start again as this was the first week of class. Although there was not going to be any teaching, the crit that all of us would get would be really vital to our final major projects. Heading into the class, it was nice to catch up with everyone, and it was pretty cool to see what everyone was working on and how far they’ve progressed.

I did not have anything to show George yet, as I was still tidying up my scene as there was no animation to show either. After I went back home I started to work on the dialogues a bit more because I had to shoot reference videos to start animating the following week. I needed to change my character’s name too, because Vert was not fitting the character well. I decided to name him Miles instead, because it was both racing themed and it fit his face. Here are the dialogues that I had come up with so far:

Coach:(enthusiastically) Good morning future racers, ready to pick your track for tomorrow’s field trip?

Students:(cheering) Yeahhh! Let’s goooo!

Coach:(points confidently) How about we start with this one?

Miles:(raises hand) Umm what’s that track? (points to a bold, crossed-out loop)

Coach:(smirking) Oh, that? That’s the infamous Daredevil Loop, shut down for a reason.

Miles:(shrugs) Why’s that? Looks easy enough.

Coach:(hands on hips) It’s too dangerous, way beyond your skill level.

Miles:(grinning cheekily) “Beyond my level”? Please, I could crush that!

Students:(gasp) No wayyyyy!

Coach:(laughs mockingly)(crossing arms) Oh really? Looks like Miles will be putting on a show for us at the Daredevil Loop tomorrow.

Students:(whisper) Is he out of his mind? What is he thinking?

With regard to the scene, I tried placing the characters just for reference to see how they would look. This was for both the classroom scene and the loop scene. I was better able to ideate what would happen with each shot. My main problem was to start finding other rigs for students, because it would look really weird for only one student to be present in the entire class. For this reason, I searched online and found a few potential rigs to place. It was really hard to match the same art style of the existing character, but I was able to pick two more character rigs to place in the classroom.

Week 19

This was the second week on getting back to university. George finally gave me first crit as this was the first time we was seeing my progress since the summer vacation that we had. My establishing shot of the racetrack actually turned out great and George was impressed with the flag cloth simulation that I had added in. He suggested that I remove one of the flags and move the camera a bit higher to make the shot look better.

Since I hadn’t done any animation, I was only able to show George stills from my shots. This was majorly for the classroom scene. I was able to show posing of both the coach and Miles, George told me to adjust the shots to follow the rule of thirds and to alter the coach’s stance a bit. With regards to the loop I was curious to know which animation George would choose for the car and he liked the regular one as expected. I also showed him the car jumping and landing sequence and he said both the animations looked fine, although the timing of the jump could be slightly better.

For this week I started to animate the loop sequence with all the pre-car startup stuff. This involved Miles fixing the car, getting into the car, starting the engine, putting on his helmet and also playing music on the stereo. For reference, I asked my parents to send me a video of them closing my car’s hood, and for getting in the car, I watched GTA 5 videos, because I remembered playing it back home.

I was able to do a decent blocking animation, but I felt that the car fixing shot looked really fake and that Miles was getting into the car really quickly. I tried fixing it the best I could and then started animating once he sits in the car. Doing the start button push was fairly simple compared to the animations I did so far, but the music stereo movement was fun to do. I tried to edit the spacing between the frames to make it look like he was actually pressing a button and not simply pushing it. I recorded myself pressing the buttons of my keyboard laptop for the same.

I also started animating the blocking for the classroom sequence as I was running out of time and I only had 6 weeks left and I was left with a lot to do. I started with basic blocking of the gestures for both the coach and Miles and I narrated the dialogues using a voice modulator to make them sound different just for reference. I was able to time my shots better and this helped set the time for the entire classroom scene.

Week 20

The following week, George gave me feedback on my blocking animation. He liked the overall look and feel of the classroom sequence and he said that the dialogues were fitting with the character animation. However, there was always good feedback to take in, and that was mainly with the coach’s stance in the scene. George suggested that I add some sort of podium with a mic so that the area where the coach stands, looks like a place of authority. I thought this was a great idea, because I didn’t have to worry about the bottom part of the body and I only needed to focus on the hands and face, which were anyways the main parts I was animating to begin with.

George also told me tighten my shots a bit, so that only the main characters were seen and I didn’t have to worry about animating the other students sitting in the class. There was also a suggestion for one of the shots, because the coach was pointing too much, I could add a shot of the track, just before the coach turns to point. I realized that on doing this, I would be able to save time doing lip sync for that particular shot and could also remove the pointing.

Next up for the racetrack sequence, I was only able to add two animations and George said he would give me feedback once I add in more stuff.

I incorporated most of the feedback and began animating the same sequence but in spline. At the same time I thought it would be great to add in lip sync and facial expressions to further portray the story and to save time later. This way, I would be able to take in feedback on the go, rather than leave everything till the end. I relooked at the references I had taken for the dialogues and I tried to mimic the same facial expressions on the characters. Regarding the body movements I tried to incorporate all of the fundamental animation principles, mainly the follow through and overlap to make it look as natural as possible.

Week 21

For this week I got feedback from George regarding my classroom scene animation. I had submitted the animation in spline, so George could clearly see the animations of both the coach and Miles. The major feedback was that the animations were happening to fast and there was too much gesturing involved, especially the coach, there was a lot of unnecessary pointing during the dialogue. He showed me a technique in Maya, where the in-between poses could be done better, where this swifter movement and I could ease into the pose better. I need to implement this in order to make the animations look more realistic, the way an actual teacher would move about. I was not able to get crit for the lip sync and facial expressions as we ran out of time.

I also had correct a few scenes for the loop sequence and George gave me more feedback on the same. For the first shot, where Miles bends in to fix the car engine, I needed to show more torque in the twists to actually look like the character was screwing in something tight. I needed to adjust the spacing of the frame and bend the character more. I also needed to change the camera angle because the character was not looking that great. George liked the way I edited the establishing shot, but he asked me to push it slightly to adhere to the rule of thirds.

I mainly worked on all of the feedback given and I started to animate the character’s animation in the car. I was really confused about the sequence of events because of the number of cameras in my scene, so I decided to type everything out in a separate word document where I noted down the frame number from the timeline and adjacent to that I wrote the camera’s name. This really helped as I was able to animate in a more organized manner. I first started with the engine revving, where I needed to animate the accelerator pedal and Mile’s foot movement, then I had to do a gear shift animation with the manual gearbox and Mile’s hand. The next shot was the rpm needle and the car burnout towards the end of the startup sequence. The next major animation was the nitrox part, where Miles lifts a primer ignition switch to prime the nitrox and then he presses two buttons on the steering wheel. I was confused whether to open the nitrous cannister and then flip the switch, but I realized that the shot was taking too many frames, so I did not go ahead with that. I’m hoping George gives me crit for both the scenes.

Week 22

This week I got my crit from George as I was able to show him the first half of my animation for the loop sequence. He said I had improved the animation but still needed the body to move more fluidly. Also the stuff inside the car like gear shifting and accelerator pedal press needed to be snappier. I realised that all my animations in general were mostly constant and smooth, until George gave me feedback. This was something I took into consideration to check which animations require smooth movement, and which required a more snappier style of movement. I needed to fix the hood animation and the character getting inside the car as well.

But this week I had one of the best days of my life because I got to sit in real life Mustang! I spoke to this UK Mustang Rental company in a place called Alton and they were kind enough to agree for me to record car audio for free. So, I rented out a TASCAM from uni and travelled to Alton. It was a very fun audio shoot where I got various sound effects for the car, like engine start, revving, car door open/close, hood open/close and car pass by. I had taped the mic to the rear end of the car for the exhaust noise, but unfortunately the wind interference was too much. I realized that next time, I needed a better muffler and I needed to place the mic a bit further away from the exhaust. However, the interior sound effects turned out great, and I can definitely use them while editing my final video. Plus I got a cool photo with a Mustang, my dream car!

All the fun aside, I had a lot of work to do to progress with my animations for the entire loop sequence. I tried to smooth out the hood animation as much as I could and then I moved on to the interior car animations after the car starts. For example to show the driver jerking back a bit into the seat. I watched a lot of rally car racing videos to see how the hands would be on the steering wheel. I noticed that even if the road is straight, there is always slight movement of the steering wheel and that in turn moves the hands and I decided to use this for my animation. I also started to animate the nitrous sequence, especially the fingers for the same. It was a bit hard because I was constricted for space inside the car within the confines of the seat, steering wheel and nitrous can. I had to carefully place the arm and fingers so that they did not intersect with the mesh. It took a really long time, but I was finally able to animate everything till the loop sequence.

Week 23

This week I further got my crit for the Loop Sequence. George told me that he was really impressed with how I had captured the character’s expressions and camera angles, when the car goes up the loop. He also like the camera placements and the end drift scene after the jump. However, I still needed to polish the helmet picking up animation and getting inside the car, door close animation. George told me there were a lot of unnecessary frames, and that I could speed up the animation to save time. With regards to the other students, I had placed them in the scene, but George suggested that I show only their heads, as the main focus should be on the coach. The other feedback were minor tweaks in the animation to add smoother movement or to speed things up a bit to show how fast the car was going. The last thing was, George suggested I don’t end with a wink, rather I change the last shot showing him gesture his victory.

Now that the animation for the loop scene was in a good place, I decided to go back to the classroom scene, because there was a lot of polishing left to do. I redid a few of the videos I took of myself to show better movement and then I redid the coach’s animation mainly. I wanted it to feel more snappier like George had mentioned, and I tried to use less pointing this time. As for the main character, I tried to ease in and ease out of his poses, so that the animation looked smoother, with a little follow through towards the end of the pose. I realized that I hadn’t touched the facial muscles at all for the rig, as I had only used the eyebrows, eyes and mouth. So, I experimented with that and also the pupils of the eyes, to add a bit of eye darts to add some element of realism.

Week 24

This was the last week of feedback and I knew I had to make the most of it, to polish my animation as much as I could. I was running out of time and I needed to start rendering soon as I had 3 different scenes and about 30+ cameras to render! I got positive feedback from George this time round, and he was pretty happy with the pace of things, especially the speed of the car and smoother character animation. He still had a few thoughts where I could add a bit more follow through for the vehicle components, but the loop scene was in a good position to start rendering finally.

The classroom sequence however, needed work to be done. I had to switch up the hands of the main character as the other hand was obstructing his face a bit, and it would look better if he gestured with his left hand instead. So, I had to mirror the animation onto the other hand. With respect to the coach, I had to polish up the lip sync a bit and remove all of the pointing that the coach kept doing. Although, I had done the same actions in my acting reference, George told me to completely remove that and use body and head motions only. He also told me to pay close attention to the eyebrows and blinks. I realized that when I did it myself in the mirror, the eyebrows would move slightly when I blinked and my eyes stayed closed for a couple frames longer. I incorporated that into my animation and tried to fix as much as I could in the classroom scene.

George also told me to remove the students altogether, but I really wanted them in the scene, because it was fun animating the girl student, who sort of gave a kind of love interest to the main character, although it wasn’t important. It just felt like a nice touch, so I decided to keep the students and I tried to make her actions as minimal as possible, so that the main focus would still be on the main character Miles.

I started to do a few trial renders and I learnt how to use the Render farm in uni. I also learnt how to remotely access it from home, so I didn’t have to keep coming in to uni to use the systems.

Week 25

As this was the final week before submission, I had three things to finish. Rendering, Video Editing and 3D Printing for the degree showcase.

The first major task was obviously Rendering. Since I knew how to use the render farm last week, it was pretty quick to set up the files for render in Blender. The only problem was that because I had a lot of cameras in my scene, and the frames were overlapping each one, I had to separately save each camera shot as an individual file and then submit that file onto the render farm. Basically, since I had around 30 cameras, I had to submit 30 files onto the Render Farm! Once the renders were done, I had to add all of the individual PNG sequences and render them again, this time as separate MP4 videos.

After the first set was done, there were a lot of lighting problems in the classroom scene that I noticed. Unfortunately, I had to render the whole sequence again after fixing everything as fast as I could. It was majorly the coach’s eyes and the ceiling lights and light leak in general. A few of the materials were also off, for example too much shininess or dull textures. Once everything was finalized, I moved onto the track scene. Overall, most of the shots looked great in the first attempt! However, I realized I had to render the slowmo shots seperately as they weren’t looking good when I manually slowed them down in video editing. This was a problem because I had rendered everything at a standard 24 FPS. For slowmo, the minimum FPS would have to be 60 FPS. It was too late to change the FPS, so I decided to slow down the animation for those specific parts manually. It was a hack, but it looked fine in the playblasts. Once I rendered those specific shots again, I was finally ready for Video Editing.

I have to say I love video editing car stuff, especially adding in the car audio and music. I started off with arranging all of the videos I had in sequence, namely the establishing racecourse shot first, the classroom scene with all of the dialogues in order and then finally the whole loop sequence. I sped up, slowed down and cut the parts that I thought were necessary for the portrayal of speed and I proceeded to add the sound effects. For this I mainly used the car audio that I had recorded in Alton with the real Mustang car. For the audios that had too much background noise, I recorded in game audio of Forza Horizon 4, where I purchased the same car in game and used different camera views to go inside and outside the car and record audio respectively. For the rest of the effects, I recorded my own audio and a few sounds from copyright free websites like Pixabay. George was kind enough to lend me his voice for the coach’s dialogue and I did the main character’s dialogue myself. For the music I knew I had to use my favourite song which I heard when I was eleven years old and that was “Pedal to the Metal” by Kazzer. This song meant a lot to me and I had to use it for my film. Although I could not use it for my final submission, it was cool to hear the song and sound effects of the car sync up together! I used some copyright free music for my final submission, but my course leader Freindred, was kind enough to agree to hear my version first, before he opened the submission.

The last part was 3D printing the track. I wanted to 3D print the car as well, but I really didn’t have time to model and paint the car. So, I bought a replica of the same car online and I used that to 3D model only a portion of the track I wanted. My idea was the only 3D print the jump scene of my film, where the track is sort of a ramp on both sides, and I thought it would be cool if the car was suspended mid air with string. I cut the track in half and added supports on both ends and I matched the scale with the car that I had with me. 3D printing the track was pretty straight forward as I had done it in the previous term, where I 3D printed a small hotwheels car and painted it. This thought occurred to me later, and I thought it would be cool to show the actual driver in the car too! So, I fixed the pose of the character, matched the scale of the car and printed that as well. I ran into a few issues here because the scale of the driver was really small and the legs kept breaking. On my second attempt as I was able to get the scale right and place him inside the car, it was pretty cool!

Final Thoughts

This has been a memorable journey for me and I don’t have words to explain how much this course meant to me. I started with nothing and I ended up creating my very own short film from start to finish. I had never done anything in the past related to this, and it was a wonderful experience to go through the entire pipeline. From not knowing the basics of film language to creating an entire narrative was really mind blowing for me.

I loved the entire workflow and pipeline, how it started out with basic sketches, to then storyboarding and mood boarding everything. I understood the importance of PreViz and how it helps visualize your story for further animation. Watching a lot of reference and shooting your own acting shots really does make a difference in how you start animating as well. Modelling was easy enough as I had done it before, but I had never created an entire world from scratch. I had to create three separate environments for my film! The tricky part was the animating the entire thing, from the car to the character and I have to say I could not have done it without George’s help. Having a mentor guide you throughout the making of the film, even if it is once a week, really does make a difference. George’s feedback and crit was invaluable and I will always keep that in mind going forward. It has really helped me do better, polished work, compared to what I was doing in the initial terms. Although it was time taking, I loved animating everything from scratch, especially the classroom sequence that I had dialogue in them. For our acting shot, we had only one 5 second clip, and I was struggling to do that. In my film, I have more than 10 dialogues, I have no idea how I did it!

The best part was watching it come together, when the car moved and the character moved with it as well. I was on cloud nine just to see the character and car working like I wanted it to, before even starting to render anything. I spent a lot of time lighting the three environments because each scene had a different aesthetic. But the real pain was keeping track of all the cameras in the scene. The loop sequence had 30+ cameras! Once I finally figured out an organized way to deal with the cameras, it was a breeze to set up the files for rendering and thank god for the render farms that our course had access to.

I have definitely learnt a lot along the way, and made loads of mistakes as well. Some of them really basic, like not checking the rig properly, before finishing animating an entire sequence only to find out that it was glitching. I’ve also realized key mistakes in setting up the camera shot, like not remembering the rule of thirds and golden ratio. All this knowledge will help me going forward and I can firmly say that I’m a bit better at animating things than when I first joined the course. I knew my limits when I first started out in this course, and I did not want to go all out doing body mechanics and creature animation. I knew there were people who animated much better than me, and looking at their FMP ideas really did drive me to push myself and not just do anything just car related. I wanted to do multiple acting shots, proper character animation and with a firm storyline that the audience would understand. I wanted to incorporate my love for cars while doing the character stuff as well, so that I could show everyone that I could do it too, I could animate.

Again, for me, having done Engineering in my undergad and working on basic 3D stuff in Blender, to create a shortfilm of this magnitude was truly mesmerizing. I had always wanted to create something of my own, especially car racing related and I finally got to do that after so many years. What started off as a small hobby collecting hotwheels cars, actually turned out to be the main idea for my very own short story of sorts.

Here’s a link to my final film:

Here’s the link to my Making Of video: