The last assignment that I did for my 3D art and animation course was a short pod race movie, which I creatively titled "The Race". The assignment was submitted in three parts.
The first part of the assignment involved research, storyboarding and concept art. After the research was done, I started designing my pod racer and some props to decorate the race scene. I used a mixture of pen and paper, and Photoshop to create my designs. I also came up with the racetrack layout, and some ideas for storyboard frames. Starting with some rough ideas, I then began to refine those that I liked the best.
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| Rough pod racer designs |
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| More rough pod racer designs |
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| Pod racer rough scale |
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| Rough designs for plants and props |
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| Some ideas for the storyboard |
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| A draft storyboard frame |
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| A very rough real-world model of my scene (made from Lego!), to help me work out the scale |
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| Draft racetrack layout |
A test-2D-animation of some beacon ideas
I ended up settling on the following pod, prop, storyboard and racetrack designs:
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| Pod racer concept |
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| Props and plants concepts |
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| Storyboard |
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| Racetrack layout |
Once I had my designs done, it was on to the next part of the assignment - content creation and integrating the work of my virtual team mates. Using my designs, plans and story board, I created the models that were required for my movie, and imported assets that the other members of the team had created. This 3D work was done using 3ds Max. I textured and animated these models, and placed cameras and some basic lights - so that I could see how the scene would look from each camera angle.
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| Pod racer cockpit - test renders |
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| Modeling the pod engines |
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| Test renders of the pod racer cockpit and engines |
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| Some texture ideas |
Once I was finished with this, I was ready to move on to the final stage of my assignment - lighting, rendering and editing the movie. I created the title and credits sequences, and also created some music and gathered sound effects, using Music Studio for iPad. Lighting was kept simple - to speed up rendering times, and editing was done using Premiere Pro CC. Finally, I rendered and compressed the finished movie file, and I was ready to submit!
The Race movie
I passed my course =).
~AmazinAdrielle
