Car Animation

After a bit of 3D today, I've put the car in motion. Had a go with reactor's 'toy car'...thingy, but to no avail. Too many things going wrong and the car bouncing wildly off the floor. Possibly too advanced for now? In the end I settled for manually animating it by moving the car and wheels across the plane (with a road and grass texture applied) and making each wheel rotate a bit to simulate them actually rolling along the ground. There is a slight, barely noticeable, noise modifier applied to the road to give it a bit of bumpiness too.

I threw the lighting and sky planes in a bit hastily which is why you can see the seams between sky panels and why some panels are too bright from some angles. "For the purposes of this demo, why not just set an image of clouds as the background (by going to rendering > environment and assigning a bitmap)", you ask? It didn't occur to me at the time so I overcomplicated it by using planes... :(

The camera angles were achieved by going to create > cameras > target camera. The camera's target was linked (by clicking 'select and link' on the main menu bar) to the car body so it followed it throughout the animation. The actual camera was then moved during key frames, just like the car, to achieve the spinning effects.

Just below is an image from the same scene. The road, grass and sky images used in this piece can be found at:

http://www.we-r-here.com/cad/tutorials/level_3/images/sky.jpg

[Internet] [Accessed 14/02/2011]

http://www.filterforge.com/filters/830.jpg

[Internet] [Accessed 14/02/2011]

http://mirror2.cze.cz/texturesLarge/grass-texture-2.jpg

[Internet] [Accessed 14/02/2011]

Although this demo isn't perfect, it has helped me prepare for later animations. For example, lighting is more important than I thought. It can all look rubbish without a good setup. Also, the floor should have been much wider so the edges can't be seen. The real world is not a narrow strip! In my final animation I also want to add some corners for the car to take to make it more interesting, but for now the camera angles do the job.