Hi everyone,
So, 6 years ago I started modelling a 1972 Alpine A110, which I never really finished as I started getting really busy at the time. Recently, I used Blender again extensively for vfx for a friend’s fun big movie project.
Now that I was up to speed with Blender again, I continued with modelling the car. But this time, I really wanted to do something cool with it. I started planning a little animation, built up a rig for simulating the chassis and suspension physically and put together a little scene, mostly as a proof of concept for what was possible. That escalated a little…
This is the animation I came up with. As I said, the rig is fully simulated with physics, which also affects pitch and roll of the chassis. It also steers automatically and has a drift controller, which I put to use on the hairpin.
With this project, I finally learned how to use geometry nodes, an absolutely awesome feature in Blender. I used them to generate the road and its texture mapping based on a curve, with some vector math involved. The wind blowing through the grass in the first shot is achieved through geometry nodes as well. The flowers were rigged and animated by hand.
There’s a smoke simulation for the tire smoke in the later shots, as well as particle systems for the little rocks that are kicked up by the tires.
I put together the environment myself, but I used some awesome assets from Blender Market like:
Dynamic Pine Biomes https://blendermarket.com/products/pine-biome-painter and
a 3d Scanned Mountain Cliff Pack https://blendermarket.com/products/mountain-cliff-pack by Per’s scan Collection, as well as
some pine bushes https://blendermarket.com/products/tree---pinus-mugo-plants-trees---set-of-4-plants and
the free spring grass set https://blendermarket.com/products/spring-grass-set---landscaping-set-include-plane-with-particle-systems by 3D shaker for the flowers at the beginning.
The race driver model I got from Mixamo, but I rigged and animated him myself. The bird at the end is an asset I originally created for another project.
All frames are rendered with 512 samples and a noise threshold of .01. Compositing and color grading is done in the Blender compositor.
For sound design, I recorded the engine sounds in a video game and then used Blender’s 3D audio for simulating the stereo separation and doppler effect. Then I added some atmo and tire squeal / wind sound effects.
Some stills:
Although it’s not 100% perfect, I’m pretty happy with the results. What do you think? Questions and Feedback are appreciated!
A little animation breakdown is coming soon…
Cheers!
!
