Satisfying Looping Maglev Train Sequence

In a futuristic floating city, a maglev train floats between stations to bring passengers to their destinations. Here's how to create this animation and also make it loop! Note that I have manually repeated the video so it displays as intended in the video player, but if you were to hit loop it would still be seamless.

1. Blender - A pretty insane piece of 3D software, especially considering it's FOSS.
2. Sketchfab - A good place to find free models from the community
3. Mixamo - A place to find pre-rigged character models and animations to go with them.

He lived a good life, but select him and click x to get rid of him.

I found this city on Sketchfab from golukumar, and it has a free license which gives us a lot of freedom.

File -> Import to import it, then do the same with the train.

The train is from @blue.blender.print, also on Sketchfab.

Use g (move), r (rotate), and s (scale) to position the train.

Only a small part of the scene is going to be on camera, so remove what you don't need to speed up the editor a little.

Use F2 to rename the train and city to clean things up.

An HDRI is a really easy to add both lighting and a background, and I found a good free one from hdrmaps.com. Import it using the Environment texture node as shown in the image.

Right click on the X Transform of the Train, then select insert keyframe. This creates a keyframe that you can see in the timeline. Move the timeline, move the train, and press I in the timeline to add another keyframe. Add as many keyframes as you need until you are satisfied with the movement.

Go to Mixamo, pick a character and an animation, and download it with the settings in the image. Make sure 'In place' is checked.

Then go ahead and import it into blender, and move/scale/rotate as neccesary.

Right now the animation only works for one second, or 24 frames. To fix this, in the Nonlinear editor, push down the track and set the repeat value to something you are happy with. To increase or decrease the speed, use the playback scale option - but note that increasing the value makes it slower.

Follow the same process from the train to animate the character. I used move keyframes and visibility keyframes to make it look like the people were getting on and off.

The lighting's kind of bland with only an HDRI, so let's add a sun light with a warm hue to make it look more like sunset.

The final render will be pretty slow, so I check everything looks good by doing a quick render with the EEVEE real-time engine.

I used Cycles render since its raytracing capabilities usually look best out of the box. I did have to turn the settings down a lot which actually gives it a more stylized look. I also used Sheepit, a free collaborative renderfarm, to speed things up.

Again, I have looped it 3 times but if it were to be repeated it would have the same effect.