Hi and welcome! I thought I’d try and document my latest project here. I’m working on a kind of rocket-powered car/ speeder based on a Toyota gt86. Here are a few concept sketches and my modelling progress so far.
I have plans to make some cool animations based on the unique way the speeder will move. The idea is that it will hover and move around and steer using the rockets on its sides (which face both forwards and backwards).
Apart from the fuel tank, I’m going to be aiming for a physically plausible model with landing gears, flaps for braking, and maybe some sick lasers. I’ll be doing the interior of the cabin too.
Of course, I’d welcome any feedback/ suggestions!
I’ve also been experimenting with animation nodes to try and get the motion that I want. I can get the car to follow a curve object and to point in the direction of the acceleration vector, but its a bit janky at the moment.
The first stage of the exterior modelling is done! I’m going to add more details and mechanisms to the outside, but at least now it looks more or less like a car. Here are some test renders. Any feedback/ critique of what I’ve modelled so far would be very welcome!
Progress update: Have just finished rendering the first test animation (really it’s just procrastinating rigging the landing gear). It’s got a lot of problems but I thought I’d put it up here for interest. Hopefully it works on here.
I rendered it out in cycles because I couldn’t get the Eevee fire to look good. It took soo long to render though, so I’ll probably try a bit harder in Eevee next time.
Here’s my favourite frame:
This work is amazing
You should be featured.
I really liked that you documented your whole workflow here
Great modelling and materials.
Just the animation of the grass when the car moves in front of them is odd, make it last long after the car has passes by
Rocket Flames test
I’ve been experimenting with using blender volume objects for use in animations. I baked a flame sim in a separate blend file and then imported it into this one as an openvdb object. The advantage of doing this is that I can then move the flames around in the scene without needing a massive fluid domain, and it runs faster in the viewport.
I rendered this test animation out in eevee.
I’ve been having a bit of trouble getting it to look comparable to cycles, particularly this weird effect with the flames being cut off in the reflection. Anyone else had this problem before?
Progress update:
Apart from some tweaks to the bodywork, I’ve redone the landing gear. It’s now rigged and with functioning pistons. Learning to rig pistons was a good learning exercise, as I intend to have a lot of pistons on this car.
I’ve also added flaps to cover over the rocket engine nozzles when they’re not in use to improve aerodynamics, but I’m not sure I like the shape of them, particularly when opened.
Today I’ve been doing some more concept work. I’m not happy with the shape of the rocket engines flaps, and I think part of the issue is the shape of the engines themselves, so it’s back to the drawing board! Here are a few concepts I’ve thought up so far:
The circles represent bell nozzles, and the rectangles in the fourth one are aerospikes.
I’m not sure which is my favourite… I’d be interested to hear anyone else’s opinion!
I’ve also been thinking about the animation I want to do when the modelling is all done. Here are a few sketched ideas of shots I have in mind:
I like the designs of the bottom left and bottom right images the most.
I think you could add stuff to other parts of the car to make it feel like its designed for high intensity rocketing. Maybe put in a roll cage? I also feel like this thing would need a spoiler or some sort of small wing to keep it from lifting too far off the ground.
Progress update:
I’ve been reworking the whole bodywork to be more faithful to the gt86, particularly around the roof and lights areas. Changing my top view reference photo helped as it didn’t really match with the other views.
I’ve also changed the car paint material. It’s still not perfect, but I think it’s an improvement. I’ve found that using a metallic value not equal to 0 or 1 seems to give the metallic paint look. I’ve got it at 0.35 at the moment.
At the moment the sides of the car are in need of the most work still, sorting out the area around the engines as well as the lines of the bodywork between the engines.
As for the engines, I’ve remade them based on SpaceX’s Raptor engine:
More work on the bodywork has been done in the last couple of weeks. I’ve reworked the sides the most, as well as some of the back and general tidying up of the topology.
I think I’m almost happy with the bodywork now. Maybe I’ll add a line curving over the front rockets, like the rear. Then I’ll be able to get started on some of the fun stuff like the paintwork and hydraulic tail fins, and the cockpit interior.
The landing gear is looking a bit sad too, so I’ll give that an upgrade again at some point.
Finally, I think I’m more or less happy with the sides of the car. I shrank the forward engines slightly to help them fit within the opening of the bodywork, because I didn’t like how they were sticking out.
I also had to retopologise much of the side of the car to add the extra creases.
I also tweaked the front of the car around the radiator grille to add in those aggressive pincer-like shapes, which I’d missed out before.
I’ve also adjusted the back of the car to allow the lines of the car to flow around the back better.
Here’s the result:
The bright patches are called shock diamonds/ Mach diamonds apparently. The purple colour is due to the methane fuel emitting light as it reacts (I think), rather than blackbody radiation (which is temperature related).
Next step I’ll add a few more segments, and work on adding more turbulence to the tail end.
Even though yours looks exactly like real-life exhaust, I still think you should make em imperfect. I thought those looked waaaay too perfect before you showed me real boosters
Yeah I agree. I’ve actually got the nodes for some imperfections already in there, but they’ll more obvious when animated. I agree that I should crank them up though. I’ll also add another layer over the top which’ll have more of a smokey look.
Rocket fire update: I’ve tweaked the flames shape a bit, added another layer of fire around the main flow, and added more noise to everything. I’ve also made it animated and changed the colours to match the reference. Here’s a quick animation:
A cool trick for animating nodes that I’ve picked up is that you can type #frame where you would put a value (I used it for the y texture coordinate) and it adds a driver to use the frame number as the value.
Next up, I’ll work on the animation for starting the engines up. I’ll also do smoke simulations to layer on top of the fire, but that can wait for when I animate the car in motion.
These look much better than the simple Conical exhaust.
Although I dont know how to do it, a bit of wavy air might look great, like the air shimmering cause its hot.
Yeah that would be cool. It might be easier to do that a post-processing effect. Otherwise, you could probably do it with a glass shader for the air with tiny variations in the index of refraction, although it might be a bit noisy.
Progress Update:
I’ve rigged the tail fins to move up and down. I guess the reason for their existence on the design (other than to look cool) is to provide some aerodynamic stability against spinning out when travelling at high speed in a straight line, but can be retracted so the car can spin around for cornering.
I’ve also started on the interior. I’ve got the basic layout of the chair and main controls more or less finalised, now I’m adding details and various instruments to the dashboard and anywhere else I can fit them. This is very much not final as I’m nowhere near happy with how it is at the moment, but it’s a start.
The instruments on the dashboard (very much a WIP). The sliding needles of the closest two to the camera in this image can be moved up and down independently using shape keys.
