Flying Truck Showdown in the Neon Tunnel

Hi! I'm thrilled to share my very first cinematic animation project with you. Have you ever played mobile games like Asphalt or something similar? The stunning graphics, the adrenaline rush of high-speed racing, and the fiery bursts from turbocharged exhausts—it’s unforgettable! This project aims to recreate that excitement, but with a twist: the cars aren’t just racing; they’re flying!

You'll need a computer with a decent graphics card and sufficient RAM. A keyboard is strongly recommended for efficiently using Blender shortcuts.

For the software, I used Blender version 3.6. As someone who isn’t an animator or artist by trade, I had to learn animation software from scratch for this project. After evaluating my options, I chose Blender because it offers a wealth of community tutorials and excellent online courses that make learning both accessible and enjoyable.

Side Note: I used an older version of blender because it seems faster on my laptop, still has the "Bloom" effect on the side panel and some shortcuts don't work on the latest version of Blender.

A video editor of your choice, i used Kdenlive, well, it's free of charge.

Take a Cybertruck, add the elements of a supercar, mount some jet thrusters, and you have a flying vehicle which embraces the theme of elite street racing with a futuristic appeal.

Intent: With so much optimism, i wanted to create an extensive scene featuring a motorway tunnel a bridge over a body of moving waters leading to an epic futuristic city.

Challenges: While learning how to build environments, i quickly realised that Blender 3.6 "Eevee" rendering engine does not support the material displacement which I needed to create realistic large scale water. Also Blender's viewport would slow down when creating extensive environments.

Resolution: I set aside some of my earlier ideas and opted for a tunnel design. The advantage? I could create a relatively short tunnel and use a looping animation to give the illusion of an infinitely long passage. By adding image-based textures to the walls, volumetric fog, emissive materials, and strategically placed area lights, I crafted a lit tunnel that highlights the flying vehicle's features, delivering a sense of speed and a cinematic atmosphere. I improvised this design from a YouTube tutorial.

Our main characters are two mad flying cyber-Trucks trying to earn first place while pacing through the neon themed tunnel. Modelling these in blender was easy and fun thanks to another Youtube tutorial which i used as my starting point and went on to add textures, lights and extra features to make the trucks more "street!"

As i made part modifications, I found it quite handy to rename individual parts on the scene browser, as that make it easier hide/Isolate specific components when needed.

Hint: When creating new parts in edit mode they become one when switching to object mode, i was initial puzzled about how this works but fixed the issue by selecting a part in edit mode then separating it from the rest via the short-cut "P" on the keyboard.

My approach to materials was to use image textures for hard to "visually code" appearances such as the asphalt road in the tunnel, resources such Polyhaven proved useful. The rest of the tunnel design employed emissive materials and volumetric fog material to capture the truck spotlights and also make ends of the tunnel less visible as mentioned earlier.

The truck base color has some dirt look on, in this case i used blender's amazing shader nodes, to add noise to a rather uniform principled bsdf material, with nodes such as the color ramp, gamma and texture mapping it was possible to engineer a more realistic look. Such techniques can be easily applied after watching tutorial A and B . (Click e'm up)

To add some character to the flying trucks i added a facial expression using some free procedural textures, how to add such textures can be found on YouTube

Lastly, I made the truck windows dark and reflective so you don't see who's behind the wheel.

The special effects employed in this project are two-fold, first the Jet thrust animation and a particle system giving the illusion of streak lines which give a sense of the speed of the flying cars. Well, honestly the particles were meant to be fire sparks, but the motion of the vehicle added some unexpected particle behaviour.

To imitate the jet thrust I first modelled two concentric frustums with both ends open, the inner part forms the hottest part of the jet thrust. The motion of the jet thrust was imitated via the use of a noise texture coupled with the texture mapping nodes, since the texture mapping nodes have a location in the x, y and z direction it was possible to shift the position of the noise texture on the mesh. With ambient occlusion, gamma and color ramp nodes it was also possible to add some transparency on dark or bright regions of the mesh, hence breaking down its uniform appearance. I would rather recommend a course on blender for a step-by-step process. (I have no affiliation with course provider)

The particle system was the easiest part as I simply added a mesh as an emitter, a small mesh geometry with emissive material and add it as the particle to be emitted on the designated particle system panel.

The animation part was one of my favourite parts of this project because blender makes it so easy to add dynamic motion to objects, all hail the Graph Editor Modifiers. I used the noise modifier in the graph editor to add some floating-like motion to the trucks. The trucks appear to be moving forward because i added two keyframes for the tunnel in two different locations, then added the cycle modifier in the graph editor to set the tunnel in perpetual motion. So the fun part about these modifiers is you get to apply a bit of Maths, it's a simple test of your understanding of frequency and amplitude of a graph.

Lastly, i placed some camera and added simple translation and rotation to capture the action in as much detail as possible.

To minimize or avoid video post-processing, i added camera cuts on the timeline using "Bind cameras to marker" and selected the cameras in the order i want my shots to be.

In preparation for rendering, i also enabled the bloom effect and motion blur to add more realism.

I rendered my animation as PNG image sequences, this took about 12 hours on my laptop, after which i assembled the images in blender and output as an MP4 video.

The pros of rendered still images is that you can pick up where you left in the event of Blender crashing or power cuts.

For sound, i used kdenlive to simply add music which closely aligns with the action.

Here's the final video animation, it was an exciting project, it's not perfect but has taught me some visualization skills which i'll use to improve my communication in the field of engineering.

Cheers!