Animate a Realistic Porsche Race with Blender - BTS

so this time around we will be taking a look at how to taking an animation concept like this one from start to final pixel we'll be chatting about the highlights such as how motion blur improves the image and how good assets are crucial for making a really good render I'll be sharing some of my own tricks for how to use hdis for automotive animations we'll do a quick round of viewport optimizations that's just going to speed up your workflow when you're trying to animate anything inside the blend the viewport I'm also going to show you how I did this exhaust fire effect and lastly I'm going to giving away a little tool that I use myself when trying to match a 3D model to a reference image so as always lots to cover I hope you'll learn a lot from this let's just get into [Music] it so as you can see I have a few different SS in here some of them are uh high quality and some of them are super low quality just in there uh to sort of guide the entire animation a little bit better so the first asset is obviously the car so that you can grab uh from CG Trader this is the particular model that I used but you can find many really good high quality models online just be aware that the high quality models are usually a little more pricey than the lowquality ones that you would find in big car packs the last thing I used was this track here which doesn't look like super high quality it looks more like a game engine or something like that but it was actually super helpful just having this mesh and then being able to fill in the blanks and set Dres a little bit more depending on where I needed to put the camera another one is this track which is really really cool uh very stylish which again it's just a really nice asset to have to be able to see the shapes and the curvature and the elevation of the track but then again you can really use this one for the final rendering if you are planning to do something that looks photo real because this is obviously stylized these are the assets that was sort of bashing together here you can probably see which assets are from where and then make my first sort of shot where I just wanted this vehicle to drive in a straight line uh across the pit Lane the idea for this project came from an Instagram post I saw which just looked really really cool and it was this uh Porsche on a racetrack so I decided to take the first image and try to replicate that in 3D getting as close as I could and dialing in the materials and the lighting to fit that uh whereas the other shs would be a little bit more of an interpretation so what I was doing here was developing a little script um that just helps me quickly toggle back and forth between the reference and the CG image so you can basically do that with just by launching the script and it will flip back and forth this way you can super quickly see what's wrong some of these things would of course also be done in comp so that's also something to consider you don't need to exactly match everything 100% in CG but the closer you can get the better and this code I just put in the description and you can also download it as a little add-on so you can install it and basically flip by hitting control W on your keyboard so for the lighting setup I was mainly just using using one H from a website called mcgr they have really high quality assets there the one I used was this one here so it's shot on a racetrack in sort of the morning setting so it fit perfectly for what I needed I just boosted the exposure a little bit and adjusted all that and it gave some really convincing lighting right away and honestly that was all I had to do I didn't add in any extra sort of Lights anything like that the only thing I did do was adding a little bit of vetting I like to do this sometimes just with planes in 3D it's not very optimized but it's a little more creative rather than trying to do it in comp afterwards if you have been trying to do car animations before you probably know that HDR for cars they work amazingly when you're doing Steel images but as soon as you're doing an animation something seems very off very fast the reason for that is that hdis are dome lights they don't have any position in space as such they are infinitely far away and because the car and the camera is moving throughout the scene you actually won't see any parallx anywhere a way to fight this is to actually project this H onto some geometry so you can see what I did here was actually adding in a plane in the background so this here is a plane that I've projected the HG onto so this just make sure that when we are moving the camera the background is actually parallaxing compared to the sky so if I didn't have this plane what would happen is that the background would look absolutely static while the camera was moving or the car and the camera was moving together and that really wouldn't look very good so the way you would set that up is with a few notes inside the material so you can make use of an empty which you use as the texture coordinates so in this case I have this empty called envirment projection so grabbing this guy you can see that it's located here in the scene and moving this around would literally move the mapping around on my plane the other thing I did do was to uh take the entire HD IM map inside Photoshop and then make a mat for it so this here is just a black and white mat that I was making in Photoshop based on the is your ey sort of cutting out the skies from the trees it doesn't have to be super accurate because the thing is that even though the M isn't perfect you don't really see it from far away because it's being put on top of the H itself you could also go crazy and do the actual projection to Geometry everywhere with buildings and everything I was doing that in a previous project you can check it out here if you want to so another thing that's very critical when working with car animations I figured was the motion blur so right now we don't see any motion blur because sadly Cycles doesn't really support rendering motion blur in the viewport so to be able to see the motion blur we would have to render a still frame so let me just launch a render of a still frame here and then you can see the comparison between just seeing a render in the viewport without any motion blur and how it would actually look when it's rendered with motion blur and all that good stuff just because of the streaks that it creates on the road when the camera and the car are moving together in a direction it makes the image so much more dynamic in my opinion and it sort of creates these sort of lines that everything is an arrow pointing to this side of the screen where the vehicle is moving so it's amazing how motion blur can really change an image so now I wanted to do what I call a quick round of performance optimizations when I say performance optimizations I actually don't mean performance as in the render time but just in the viewport playback because if you're trying to animate a car trying to do it with 12 frames per second is very difficult and you will have a lot of headaches so what I like to do is for all these sort of objects you can see how they are all sharing the mesh so if you go into one and start editing you can see how it's changing on all of them that's something to make sure if you have objects inside the scene and they are literally looking the same select all of them hit contrl l u link object data and it'll just make sure that they're instanced what you can also do is make instance collections so our collection instances so putting all these guys inside a collection ction and then later on hitting shift a collection instance then points you to that collection that is an even more performant way of optimizing your scene will make it playback much faster than otherwise another thing I use all the time is having collections where I put in all the heavy objects so when I'm doing my animation I don't really need to see all these guys so I would just hide them like so and just by doing that I actually have a live playback in the viewport just be aware you have to either use the disable in viewport or disable the collection completely you can enable the disable and viewport toggle here if you want because hiding them temporarily in the viewport it doesn't really increase the performance as you might expect because it's still somewhere inside the scene even though it's not visible some other things you can do which are super helpful is just use to simplify settings inside the render tab uh even though it's in the render tab it also works in the viewport you can take the max subdivisions turn them down to zero and you can also take the child particles and turn them down to zero and stuff like that that will just make everything much smother to work with so all these things usually just speed up the viewport a little bit because blender's viewport is super great but it can very easily end up being super slow if you have too many Optics in there rendered at the same time so the last thing I want to show is just this little effect I'm doing in the end so you might have noticed that in the end we have a little bit of a flame just coming out of the exhaust pipe just a little creative choice that I I added in there just for fun and for still images it doesn't look or from still frames it looks a little bit strange but it's sort of works when it's in motion and everything is sort of just playing so the way I do this is very simple I literally found a uh video where I was extracting some frames from and these frames I'm just playing back inside blender like so you can do this yourself if you have any recorded footage of an exhaust pipe Flame or something like that that you've recorded just extract the frames from that you can mask it out so in After Effects even blender so the only thing you have in the video is just the flame and then you map that onto some planes some 2D planes in this case I made some quick ugly mug up here you can see how this is just UV mapped to match where the flame is more or less and putting this together gives you that effect what I like to do too is take the same plane that I've built once and just rotate 90° so you also have a little bit of a reflection on the car but you don't really need to do this if you don't want to then what you can do is offset the animation or the sequence a little bit for the two different flames and you got something that looks like a flame coming out of the exhaust pipe of the car it doesn't really cost anything to render because you're not simulating anything you're literally just putting an image in there but since you're doing it in 3D you actually get the lighting effects from it and you can see everything in real time in your viewport which is pretty neat so for the second shell I was trying to emulate something like a drone camera following the vehicles around the track so for each shot in the animation I want us to do a little bit of a different camera setup and in this case I was trying to do this sort of drone setup and having the Drone come from one side of the car fly behind the car because I thought that would be very Dynamic and be quite an interesting shot also technically because so many times what you see is only the car from one angle so you only see it under one lighting condition but here we see the left side and the right side of our hero car apart from that this Dynamic motion also made it possible to sort of introduced the second kind of the shot so technically how I set this up inside blender was that I used the look at constraint on the cameras so you can see here how if I go into the constraint of this camera has a little shaky fi constraint for the camera shake and all that stuff but that's basically secondary the main part was the track two constraint that I'm am tracking to the body of the vehicle but the key thing is that I'm not tracking it 100% I am taking the influence and dragging it down just a little bit um to give it a little bit more of this loose human track that isn't perfect and the car might shift a little bit in the frame and also gives me the possibility to move the camera around like so always aiming in the car but not just giving this super CG always in the center sort of thing and when you track it with less than 100% it also allows you to actually rotate the camera a little bit afterwards whereas if you have the influence at 100% no matter what you do in the rotation channels of the camera it's not going to affect anything because the constraint will be overriding all of that motion so this is the setup I came up with and I think it works pretty well for this this sort of shot I think this is a good point to also talk about how I animated the vehicles so you might uh be familiar with this sort of UI this is launch control that I've been working on for a little bit over than a year now and we just released an update where you now can rig multiple cars and animate them inside the same scene so what I would be doing for shots like this was to draw the line of my vehicle that I wanted it to follow and again you can draw the different lines of different vehicles and you can always change the animations on the the fly art directed however you want and then in the end what you do is uh turn on the physics it's just one button and then it calculates the life physics but all this you can learn more about on the website if you're interested another thing I just want to mention here is how I use the environment trying to make the action seem more interesting so like I talked about in the beginning I used the track assets and particularly this track was the one I used for this second shot so even though the meses that you see on the images online are still in here I added so much extra stuff around and seted the entire area to make it fit the animation I wanted to make the first thing I did was to have the camera be behind this sort of wall and net in the beginning and have that reveal the vehicle the second thing I did was adding in these flags particularly behind the car because that would improve the sense of motion when the vehicle is traveling past these vertical lines and because we have the vehicle driving One Direction the Drone moving around rounded in the opposite direction then that also gives a better sense of speed and lastly of course having the Drone be very close to the ground always makes everything look more exciting rather than if the Drone was lifted up in the air another thing I was also doing was making sure that the foreground would change so I was making sure that I had some different objects that were flashing red and red and white red and white all the time to again make this sense of speed even better apart from that I actually also o added in some lamp posts behind the camera the reason for doing that is that the car reflects whatever is behind the camera so adding these in would again make the sense of speed as these as Reflections travel across the paint of the car so for this last shot I uh used a different type of camera so I wanted to have a little bit more of a settled ending for this animation so basically have it all calm down and um for that I found this handheld camera that's static not moving along inside the car or flying around the car just one place you can clearly see the envirment of what's going on and then the car is just sort of Disappearing into the distance so another thing you can do is also turn on physics for the vehicles so you can see if you open up the launch control menu you have the two different Vehicles here tracked in different collections so let's say for this one let's go to the 911 Turbo see right now I have the physics turned on if I turn them off you can see it's just driving with the animation but turning that on would just calculate physics on the fly so as you can see here if we play back the animation we have a little bit of pitch as the car is breaking to get down to the speed that the yellow car is at so if you want to adjust these things this is something I personally really wanted inside the tool so this way you have super fine control and super artistic control over these type of simulations this can of course also mean that you can go way over the top and make something that doesn't look realistic at all but this is where you need a little bit of common sense and I artistic direction to get it to look exactly how you envision it to look AP from that launch control also comes with a lot of physics presets that you can use which just are optimized for race cars trucks so off-road trucks and stuff like that or you can open the customized settings and then mess around with all the different spring and damping values yourself if you feel like it but I have a whole separate video on that where I'm playing around with a little RC truck in a skate park showing off all these features how they work and how you can adjust to your liking

Channel: Daniel Vesterbaek

Views: 11,992

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Id: 0IOboMxvlnQ

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 16 2024