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This is one of a set of 3 animated races that I made for the University of Virginia's Sports Program. My job was to animate these car races, set up the camera angles and edit the videos in such a way to keep thousands of people interested in watching the video boards during a break in game play. The client wanted something more dynamic and higher energy than the typical high-angle wide shot often seen in these type of arena animations. My goal was to show a narrative of the race by keeping the cars in view most of the time and showing them in relation to one another.

I first had to model and texture the race track and the environment for the cars to go around on. The client supplied a 3D object of the basketball arena exterior which I made a low resolution model of and baked the surfaces and lighting onto since we wouldn't be getting a good look at it. I modeled the starting pavillion, clock tower, camera booths, and billboards seen around the track. The trees are just images on sprite particles.

The client provided the 3D model of the car which had no UV maps, and was broken into several layers and surfaces. I altered it by gutting the interior (to save on animation and render time), consolidating the geometry and surfaces, and making UV maps for the car body so I could change the paint jobs easily. I bought a plug-in to rig the car.

To animate the race, I started with a mostly empty scene or project file and animated a null with a car parented to it moving around the track. I used that initial motion path to make the paths of the other two cars. Once the path around the track was done, I animated the secondary animation of the cars (weight shifts, break lights, the steering of the front wheels, etc). Some of this secondary animation was done using a Logitech game pad connected to the PC and to Lightwave with another plug-in that was bundled with the car rigging plug-in. The motion recorded in this way needed a bit of cleanup in the graph editor (curve editor), but it was fairly easy work. Once all the animation was done I baked the animation curves and loaded the animated cars into the master scene.

With the car animation done, I set up cameras (around 5 stationary cameras, a chase camera for each car and one or two flying cameras), and rendered a preview render for each one. I took all the camera preview renders into Final Cut Studio and used its multi-camera editing mode to sort of do a live-switch of the entire race as it was playing. I then refined the edit to make sure it flowed well. Once I had the edit locked down I used the Camera Selector master plug-in in Lightwave to switch the cameras during rendering. At some point during this process I edited sound effects to the action on the screen and combined the sound effects track, music track, and rendered frames into the finished movie.

The client wanted some flexibility to alter the races so I made it possible to swap the car bodies around to give the races more variety. I also set up race result scene so the background can be easily changed to match the venue the race is being shown in. The client wanted everything to be done in-camera and they wanted the render times to be less than 3 minutes per frame. This, and the limited schedule, factored into some of the design decisions such as blacking out the car windows and limiting what can be seen outside the track.