Diesel Punk - Animation (Uni Assignment)

Diesel punk (Unreal Project)

 

Video link to the final result of the project, the video length is 4 minutes 36 seconds long. The first 40 seconds of video is the final result of the animation whilst the remaining 3 minutes and 56 seconds are a brief insight of the creation process (sorry for the rough voice, I was feeling sick during the creation of the video) 

The Creation process

The assignment was to create a game ready model and animate it either within 3ds max or another third-party application, I chose to create the model within 3ds max and rig it within unreal.

Having never used 3ds max before I spent my time following the tutorials given to learn by our tutor lee, The three tutorials given for learning 3ds max interface were creating a robot, creating a couch and finally creating a lowpoly.

The creation of these three model gave me a basic understand on how to use simple functions, such as bevelling, inserting, extruding and loopcuts. I learned basic modifications such as the mirror modifier, array modifier and turbo smoothing. the outcome of creating the car was a model that could be used for rigging and animating into a scene that could be used for the assignment. however I wanted to challenge my to make a high poly diesel punk car that I would be proud of presenting, so I went onto the internet and looked up tutorials on how to make high poly 3D cars. A lot of tutorials I had watched started out with the same method of getting reference images of the vehicle I wanted to create and set them up to scale within 3ds max, this part of the tutorial wasn't an issue for me since the reference images were easy to set up to scale the difficult part was following the reference images with the geometry. I first followed a tutorial where the instructor started with a single squared polygon and a left perspective, he extruded the singular polygon to follow the curve of the car and then proceeded to adjust the curve from the front perspective, this is when it got a little complicated in my mind because I was using a difference reference compared to the video and it producing the result I wanted. The reason I chose a different reference compared to the video is because I thought not every car I wanted to model was going to have a video on how to create it so I wanted to solve the issues as I was going along with the tutorial videos. Ultimately this approach ended up failing and I decided to look for another tutorial.

I was search and search, tutorial after tutorial until a came across a guy on YouTube called "On Mars 3D" and his method to creating high poly models really helped me visualised the end product. The tutorial used a mixture of refence images and Nurb curves to create a shape that can be "Traced" around to make the shell o the car

This approach to modelling actually help me produce my first official high poly car model which was a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle racing car.

Practice

During my first attempt at Nurb curves I went for a simple shaped car to try get a feel for adjusting curve point to match the reference images. 

After this attempt I was happy with the understand on how nurbs and snapping the topology to said nurb curves so I went onto my second attempt which was an attempt at a sports car.

I thought this model was going into a good direction in terms of shape how ever 3ds max ended up crashing and I made the rookie mistake of forgetting to implement save and lost a project (A mistake I learnt to never do again after this project).

First official Attempt

My first official attempt didn't turn out the greatest but a lot to be improved upon but for my first attempt I was happy on how it turned out. On my second attempt I created a Cadillac V16 and I thought this model went a lot smoother as I had gotten used to creating Nurb curves and tracing around those curves, taking time on the overall shape.

Second Attempt

I was really pleased how this one turned out compared to my first attempt on modelling how ever I did not have the time to finish this model before dead line. The plan I had for the final animation for the assignment was going to be having the first low-poly model and a high poly version interact with each other showing the process of my modelling journey throughout the assignment so I ended up scrapping this model and Creating a high poly version of the original tutorial I was given at the start of the assignment.

Final Model

 

I was please with how the final model turned out in comparison to its lowpoly counter part, I ended up material to the different parts of the car so I could edit them within substance painter.

Substance Painter

Substance Painter made texturing the car a lot easier since it has an automatic UV unwrap feature that worked pretty much perfectly allowing me the ability to drag and drop materials onto the car or select a certain material and paint the texture onto the car.

Creating the bones in unreal

I imported the car into unreal and installed the "skeletal mesh editing tools" addon so I could create the bones within unreal, I create the bones in unreal instead of 3ds max because when I tried creating the bone within 3ds max and importing the car into unreal engine for some reason the doors and wheels would be the only parts of the car that would show, I later found out this was because the cars body was not connected to a bone, during the assignment I thought only moveable components of the vehicle needed to be attached to the bones but I later found out after the assignment that was not the case in order for the entire vehicle to show within unreal. 

Once the bones were added and attached to the wheels I added the weight of the bone to their selective wheel and tried rotating them to see if they move.

Rigging

Rigging the car was an interesting experience since there is three ways of doing it within unreal the automatic rig, manually rigging or rigging through blueprints. I originally tried manually rigging the bones with control point but for some reason even when following a tutorial the control points did not show up where I declared them on the bones, I looked online to see if anyone else was having the same problem to no avail so I went and followed another video by a guy named "Post process" who shows how to rig a vehicle and how to animate it using a rail control rig.

Landscaping

Landscaping was probably the weakest point of the project I wish I had more time to spend on it but I spent a lot of my time during the assignment learning modelling, rigging and learning how to animate the car so I didn't get as much time to spend on the environment which I wish I put more time aside to improve the final design for the environment.

Final Reflection

Overall I found the assignment very fun, Learning how to model high poly cars was really fun, There is still lots of room for improvement but for a beginner to 3ds max and high poly modelling I am very happy with the final results of the project. If I were to return to the project I would work on the environment some more to make it more diesel punk themed and I would also go back to the original animation idea where the original low poly model interacts with the new high poly model.

Thanks for reading this blog post, I hope you have a nice day :)