Endless Engine Contest

Hi I decided to do the Endless Engine Contest.

I first started by downloading the Endless Engine template.   I then Started to find vehicles to add to the scene.   I found a truck on I think blendswap.com and Used the constraint copy location to get the vehicle to exactly match the demo scene. Then I hid the demo vehicle.   I then added a noise plugin to fill out the motion of the truck.   I then tried to make the parts of the truck sway with the physics of such a turn.  I tried to just tilt the Body of the truck but then the tires would go through the floor.   Then I joined all the random bits of the back of the truck and separated the body from the frame.   I then animated the tilt of the body.  I then added noise modifiers to all the separate pieces to make them jiggle.  It was hard to get the timing of the wheels in the front. and I didn't think to use the copy rotation constraint on them so I would only have to animate one of them.

So This is the coolest video of how to rig a car with rigid body simulation.  This would make any car animation easy.

Then I found more parts on blendswap.com like the concrete roadside thing. The Buildings are from the kitbash Minerva set. And a mountain from blendswap again.  I had to put them all in collections and hide them because I haven't updated my computer yet. So a good habit is to composite your items.  The forground, midground, and background.  So replacing the vehilce was simple.   The node setup in davinci was simple blur, glow and several others. Like film grain.  These are wip animations rendered at 30% of actual size.  Texures were from the sanctus Library on the truck. 

Then I abandoned this because I didn't think It looked good enough.  So I started with the traffic add on, free utility truck which had a large space for characters.
The rigacar addon is already applied and I found it much easier to animate the car.  I found a Construction worker in Mixamo which was approximately the right size.  Drag and drop and parent to the cab area of the truck.  Separated the Cab so I can add the noise modifier to make that jiggle.  Added Noise modifier to all the wheels to make them jiggle.  Added Noise modifer to the truck itself for more dynamic motion from the original. Notice the screen right window isn't transparent.  To fix under render settings transparent check mark transparent glass.  (took me awhile to find why that was happening)

So Next I was thinking about putting something in the shot to have a story.  So I found an alien from mixamo and a blaster motion.   The motion is of someone using a gun with recoil.   So I thought alien why not a blaster.  I found a Cartoon version on blendswap here.by jesusnuno.   I then found a laser blast on a 2d plane also from blend swap.  here, by Salatfreak.  I then used a math node to turn off the laser and a value node that was key framed.  A value of one turned on the image and a value of zero turned off the image. Then I added the alien in a seperate blender file, used the mixamo rigging tool and imported him into the scene.

Here is a test wip.

So I was going to have something happen in the scene to the screen right and figured that behind the truck would be wrong.  So mixamo has a mirror function and I was able to re-import the alien.  Ha he is standing in the truck.  Now the next thing was a problem the window was up and I was going to animate that shattering and flying into the road but again limitations are I still haven't upgraded my computer.  So no simulations.  Rolled down the window (required seperating in edit mode) The next thing to do was what does he blast.   I have a ufo from the forbidden planet Movie I replicated and I thought that would be great to enter the scene and be blasted by the alien with a blaster gun.  I scaled the ufo down and put that in the scene and parented to the truck.  Then I was able to place some keyframes to animate the ufo approaching getting hit by the blaster and crashing. I used the graph editor with noise modifier and constrained that to certain frames (the ones when the ufo hits the ground.)

  I then parented an image plane that was imported and parented to the ufo of vfx sparks.  (The surface for that was actually not so easy to understand, hook up a mov file with base color emmision and alpha. Set the the start frame.  In this case when the beam hits the ufo) 

And still something was missing.  You couldn't see the alien in the truck so well and the mirror hid him.  So I thought maybe I can have him stick his head out of the window.  And semi successfully animated that.   Part of learning how to do that was learning what keyframes to delete in the motion capture. And then re keyframing the controls of the alien. (using the mixamo Rig) There is also an  awesome addon called anime aid which broke in the blender 3.4  So sad because that helps quite a bit with mo-caped data.  Blender foundation should incorporate that into blender.

My Brother Was very helpful with the Davinci stuff because he is an expert.

This is the final entry.

I added some sound design.   Some of the audio was from freesounds.com 

Here is a more professional version  with the sound design done by Peter.  He also used fusion to do a different post style as well. And added camera shake in fusion.