The Cycles version of the mine cart ride animation.
A few months ago, after I finished working on my rollercoaster animations, I thought I might put some of the tech to use for another project. I took inspiration from the mine cart sequence from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and created this, a wild looping mine cart ride through a series of tunnels, over a pit of lava, and an underground lake.
Early on in this project, I realized that I needed to employ a lot of volumetrics if I wanted to match the feel of the scenes from Temple of Doom. This evolved from having “zones” of volumes in particular areas to just using a global volume shader.
It produced some excellent results, but it also made rendering the full animation (with Cycles) take a long time. So long, in fact, that when the project was about 85% complete, I switched over to Eevee. This made all of the hanging light objects, which use materials with emissions for lighting, not work properly, so I had to reconstruct the lighting. Render times improved by a lot, but I missed the accuracy of Cycles, and it still looked a little video game-y by comparison.
The Eevee version of the mine cart ride animation.
After the Eevee version was complete and I finished the sound design, I bit the bullet and began rendering the Cycles version. It took 32 hours to render in Cycles on an RTX 5090 - which is about 4-5 times longer than the Eevee version!
I’m happy that took the plunge with Cycles though, because I think the animation looks better there (despite a bit of weirdness with the denoiser over the underground lake).
Some elements in this scene are procedurally generated with Geometry Nodes: the mine cart track and supports for it, the scaffolding/catwalks that hang in the tunnels, and the lights that hang on the walls. The steam/smoke is a volumetric material that exists inside of a basic cube.
I modelled the tunnel by hand, then applied some modifiers to add detail. The material I made for it has different elements applied to the floors, walls, and ceiling based on vertex colors which I painted on.
The textures in the scene are mostly sourced from textures.com. I produced the audio in Audition using various sound effect libraries I’ve purchased over the years, and I assembled the video in Premiere.
If you’d like to see how the two versions of this animation compare, I’ve made a split-screen version:
A version of the mine cart ride animation the is split between Cycles and Eevee renders.
Cycles frames:
Eevee frames:
And one last image for the post’s thumbnail. 
