Year 1 Final project - Assignment 3

Working in groups normally wouldn't be my strength, however ever since my first semester here at Ulster, working with like-minded, fellow hard-working people has really given me a new perspective on how team work can be conducted to create amazing things. This final assignment was the best teamwork experience of my life. After being dumped from my group of friends and being replaced by someone else, another group, looking for a fifth member picked me up, consisting of my now friends Oisin, Jack, Aoibheann and Alanna. I had worked with Aoibheann before on the Cheeze World project, so that was already a friendly familiar face in my new group.

We started brainstorming:

The first idea was to have something to do with a wolf, and a princess. I will be honest here and say that I didn't have the slightest clue what was going on and at this point I was only happy to be here and have a team to work with, and wanted to work with my newly tapped 3D skills. We realized that modelling and rigging and furring a 3D wold character would be a living nightmare for a small, completely inexperienced team of 5 people, so we decided to hold a small contest of new ideas. My idea of a creepy night-time horror car based thing ended up getting nearly all the votes. Here was the initial idea:

We ended up deciding that making it a 40s/50s adventure horror film would be best. Since we could pay tribute to so many great classic films such as Thelma and Louise(1991), Jeepers Creepers (1980), Citizen Kane (1942). And video games, since it is 3D, such as LA Noire (2011) and Mafia 2 (2010), both of which are set in 1940s and/or 50s Americana style, romanticized USA. Right away we decided on a car model that we we would use, a convertible. All classic movies have a convertible in it. Open top casual cruiser getting involved in crazy adventures. Some sketching and idea generation:

Animatic: For one of our sessions we had to present an animatic of the animation. We made two. Jack made one, and I made one. I'll be honest here and say that i made this entire thing in one evening, however I am still quite pleased with it!

Part 1 - The Car I started work on a model in Maya:

The car i ended up making was loosely based on the 1938 Buick Type Y and later Buick convertibles such as the Super Eight. I tried to keep it fairly simple and low-poly-ish, while also making it look nice and smooth, like well hammered steel.

Here are some early renders. Just looking at these, I have to tell you how happy I am with these, how genuinely happy with myself I am. Sort of full of emotion and surprised, that I am actually finally learning how to do these amazing things. The Car looks so good!

Interior received fairly simple treatment since it is never truly visible in the animatic that we presented. Part 2 - The Truck

I then started work on the lumber lorry that would chase our convertible car.

I was able to keep the truck much simpler, since in theory, it would be shrouded in darkness in the final animation, and only the front would be shown in more detail at the very end of the animation. So I skipped the interior entirely on this model.

The modelling process was fairly simple, I used old American trucks as a guide and reference to get the look and proportions of the lorry correct. The logs would simply be elongated cylinders.

Rust texture was applied, and I made the headlight housing have a slight angle inwards, to make the "eyes" of the truck appear more angry, and the grille of the truck function as a sort of mask, similar to Bane from Batman movies. Part 3 - Rigging and test renders

I simply used control shapes and parenting to make the wheels and "Suspension" work, to give some movement to the vehicles.

I like to do some still test renders to see how my models work in an environment that loosely simulates the final environment they will live in in the final animation. For a quick simple simulated forest i simply create a plane, "cut" a road into it, and use repurposed logs as trees.

For the test renders themselves I use Arnold renderer to see how my models interact with real light.

Part 5 - Final Outcome

Jack then took all our 3D models and he worked on the actual animation himself.

Part 6 - Reflection

It feels like we started this project years ago. With the pandemic and the lockdown forcing everybody to stay at home, and the university campus to shut down, my already broken sleep cycle and general sense of time has been thrown completely out of the window. I cannot remember the last time i went into Belfast city centre, to the campus, to our animation studio, and saw my team mates and tutors face-to face. It feels like this is distant past. Despite all this, the university has done a fantastic job of keeping us on track with online classes and with the aid of programs like Slack and Messenger they have kept an eye on us and helped us work on our projects. With the help of Discord and Google Drive, me and my team have managed to work on our animation from home, and somehow we pulled it all together in the end. I don't know how the future of our animation course at Ulster University will look like. But at the same time I don't want to think about it for now. I have faith that soon, all this will be behind us, and this will be the thing that feels like the distant past. Could have I done anything differently during the project? Of course. I would have procrastinated less. I could have done more work, helped out my team mates more. I should have connected to more of the online classes. But I didn't. My mental health has been getting worse, and this general sense of doom has largely kept me down. But now as the summer is just around the corner, and as I enjoy a little bit of sunshine on my body during my daily exercise outing, I am starting to feel hope again. All in all, I would just like to thank my team for being there for me, for helping me out, and for giving me feedback. Thank my tutors for giving me feedback and advice. And thank my parents for supporting me and making sure I have my own home, and food on the table. Thank you for reading, and I will see you in the final post of Year 1, where I will show my 3D fruit bowl project!