Car Chase

Ice particles

Ice kick up

Particles

For the car chase scene in the trailer, I could not afford to use any more time up on starting a new model completely for the Jaguar, so I slightly modified the roof, front grill and added missiles from the Aston Martin model , and changed the colour to green. I wanted the scene to be as much like the movie as possible, but I found that spinning the car and keeping it all in time, and including an explosion was too complicated. So I added a few assets of my own that I thought worked very well in all.

Snow Particle System

To make the scenery though, I made a few planes so that the scene wouldn't look too black and have random spots of darkness on what should be an nice bright scene. So I added a sky to the planes and to one plane I added a scene of some ice from the Antarctic. This worked well alongside the pieces of ice I created and put in front of the image in an attempt to make the image seem more three dimensional. I added an ice texture too and I also added this to the scenery flooring. I also added some snow by using the particle systems, this was very simple to use as it just created a patch of where it would form snow, this was editable and could be changed in aspects of size, shape of snow, amount of snow. I considered using the blizzard instead of the snow as I thought it would look good, but in the end I went with the snow as it looks more subtle, and also there wasn't any snow in this scene in the movie anyway.

To make the cars chase, I made them move by using keyframes, this worked well, until one thing was changed and it either made everything else in the scene work differently, or not work at all. So after a while of discussion with Richard, I decided to make the cars follow paths. This took the mind back to the path tutorial. This made things a lot easier to control, when I wanted the cars to drift and swing out the back of the car, it was easier to do and looked a lot smoother.

So I decided that when the cars swung out, it would look more realistic if the drivers seemed to find it difficult to regain control of the car. This meant all I would have to do was to swing the back of the car back in just slightly too much and then bring them straight again. Also, when the cars swung out, I thought it would look impressive if the car tyres skidding could kick up a fair amount of snow/ice. I did this using the particle system's super spray feature. This was also fairly simple to set up and sustain. The system automatically has a default spray system in place when it is first set up, so the first things to be edited were to direct and position the spray, and where the spray was coming from, once the spray was being generated from the tyre, I needed to find out what keyframe the spray needed to be started, that is also on the default settings, but I set the spray to not start until the car was starting to skid across the ice. When the car seemed to lose control and the back of the car swung out, I set the particles to spray out, and to add effect, I put the camera in a position that the particles would seem like they are going to hit the camera.

The particles I used were the ‘tetra’ particles, this, I felt made them look more realistic than the stars, triangles or mesh.