Week: 26 Apr – 2 May

Last week, Luke created a new collaborative folder for the indie film project on his shared OneDrive for us to share and upload our working files. He also opened a new review page on Ftrack for anyone wanting to share videos for feedback.

Since we were still waiting for the actual footages to work on, Luke provided several materials for all departments to practice first. For the animation team, Luke made a tutorial video on how to animate a car with realistic motion and rumble. We can practice using the temporary car model from the collaborative folder.

I downloaded the car and road model including their texture files. The car was rigged very nicely with necessary controllers to animate the car complete with automatic tire rotation when the car moves. I setup a new project folder and put everything in the respective directories.

Even this is just a practice, I used reference system when importing both models into a new empty Maya file, which will become an animation file. The animation will be done on a model that was linked to the external file. So any update to the original car model will be applied back to the animation file automatically.

I repositioned and placed the car properly in a suitable location on the road. I then made a ‘camera and aim‘ and parent it to the car’s root controller so the camera will move together with the car.

I used animation layers as suggested by Luke in his tutorial. I created 2 additional animation layers for this. BaseAnimation layer is for the main car movement while carbody_02 and carbody_03 are for the car’s body animations.

I started with the rumble animation first on the carbody_02 layer. I made a short 60 frames sequence with a slight bumping motion. I then loop the sequence in the Graph Editor using Curves > Post Infinity > Cycle with Offset.

I then made another animation in carbody_03 layer with much longer sequence with subtle and smoother wobble animation. The animation in both layers will blend together to create more organic motion and not look too repetitive.

I tweaked both animations several times by adjusting the curves and keyframes in the Graph Editor until I satisfied with the result. The objectives were to make the rumble to look very subtle but still noticeable and realistic.

After the rumble motion finished, I then animated the car’s root in the BaseAnimation layer to make the car moving down the road. I only animated a small portion of the animation and loop it again using the same function as before to create a continuous motion.

For the last part, I animated the camera using it’s target (aim). I made a subtle camera shake motion manually to the camera’s aim to make the camera look like it is being held by hand.

Below is the final animation for this practice.

Final Animation