Making the Car Chase

The aim of this scene was to have Bond driving the car across a rocky desert like background, with the harrier following him firing missiles towards the car and seeing the explosions caused by the missiles. To finish the scene, Bond swerves the car so that it is not facing the opposite direction and fires his own missile from the car, which then hits the harrier and makes it explode and disappear, and then Bond reverse off concluding the scene.

The objectives to achieve this aim was to create the rocky desert like scenery ready for the animation, followed by importing the car and the harrier to the scene. Using cameras and animation tools, to make an effective car chase.

The first task was to create the plane for the car to drive across. First the horizon line was created using a very thin cylinder with a terrain bitmap taken from the 3DS Max tutorials folder. As shown in the first image, it is rather bland as it is to begin with.

Instead, the displacement button on the material editor for the terrain bitmap was then adjusted in selected parts of the plane. To do this, the plane was converted to a poly, and using the face editor, the outer edges were selected and then modified in the material editor. For such a quick alteration, it brings a lot more depth to the scene. The effective part of the displacement modifier is that it doesn't make everything all level, it makes it all different which is why it is so effective for this scene, as rocks are not all the same size.

A simple rectangular plane was placed on top of the cylinder to represent tarmac for the car to drive across. Due to the displacement modifier on the cylinder material, the tarmac needs to be lifted and then tested to make sure it doesn't disappear into the cylinder material.

Once complete, the animation can begin. The explosions were actually really simple, as there is a tutorial that was followed to produce that effect from 3DS Max tutorials menu. It basically comprised of creating a plane on the stage, and put an .avi file as the material of an explosion. So that as the car zooms across the screen, the plane material is just playing like the rest of the animation and shows the explosions. This gives a template for where the explosions need to take place on the timeline and where the car needs to be driving and where the harrier should be placed.

The car moves across the scene by using Auto Key and scrubbing the timeline to the next part of the scene where the car needs to be and Auto Key fills in the blanks. This is also the case for the harrier. The positioning of the car needs to represent a car swerving evading missiles dropping on the ground, therefore the car will swerve suddenly from left to right like in the .avi file beneath. The harrier will also swerve as it endeavours to fire the missile onto the car. 

A tedious but necessary task is to adjust the positioning of the wheels so that they appear to be turning in the direction of the car with the rest of the animation. In real life the wheel is the element of the car that controls the direction that the car moves in. This needs to be represented in the animation. However, by doing this, it alters all of the animation of the wheels, which means that every frame of the two front wheels needs to be altered so that it doesn't look like the wheels are about to fall off. Bond is very stylish and very cool, he would not be seen in a broken car on purpose, if so he would do something very cool to destroy the enemy by also destroying the uncool car. This will not be happening in this scene, so the wheels need to be changed. To ensure it looks right in the animation by scrubbing the timeline, the finished appearance is displayed in the view ports. 

A target camera then needs to be used in this scene as the target is the car within this scene. The car will drive towards the camera, and the camera will adjust so that it captures both the harrier and the car amongst the explosions. The positioning will be determined by choosing the most effective shot with the explosions. This is the scene result. This was rendered by adjusting the time configuration settings to finish on the last animated frame, and then setting the range in the render set up from zero to the last frame. The file was then selected as an .avi file and the folder to save it to was also selected. The render button is then selected and when played it looks like the below .avi file. I think it works rather well.