Project 4: Motion Path

Story Board

Reference

I originally wanted to do something underwater, but lets just say that really did not go as planned. I abandoned that idea and decided to do a roller coaster. Morale was low and I was having a hard time being imaginative with a roller coaster design, so I decided to use this Lego roller coaster as a reference.

Storyboard

This is the storyboard I came up with for my roller coaster. Since I based it off the Lego coaster the motion made a lot of sense. First, the roller coaster would climb up the incline slowly (like it would on an actual coaster) until it hit the drop point where it should hang for a second to build anticipation. Then, it would drop and move really fast along the rest of the curve as it loses momentum and eventually slows to a stop. I also thought, since it was based on Lego, it would be fun to have these larger then life Legos floating around to make the rider feel immersed in the ride, and that it would be cool to have the "Everything is Awesome" from the Lego movie playing. I thought adding those elements would give it a real Rock n Roller Coster vibe (ride at Disney).

Model | Principles | Animation

MODEL

Here are some images of the roller coaster I ended up with. I decided to have the rollercoaster outside and on some grass, so theres a "ground" plane and a spherical panoramic view of the sky which I made by reversing normals and adding backface culling to a sphere. I realize it's not very realistic to have a roller coaster in the middle of no where, but then again its surrounded by giant floating legos. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I made the roller coaster itself by covering the edges of polygons to curves, so that they could be as smooth as possible, and I connected them using bezier curves. I then created a track piece and used MASH to duplicated and used a curve warp to get it to wrap around the skeleton. I used a duplicate offset of the curve as the aim curve to straighten out the track and maintain the right orientation. I found this tutorial extremely helpful and would definitely recommend it. The supports are just cylinders which I tried to make somewhat realistic so that the roller coaster wasn't floating.

The Lego brick models came from TurboSquid.

DISNEY PRINCIPLES

Anticipation

I really REALLY tried to employ anticipation by having the rollercoaster hang over the edge a bit before the big drop. I ended up freezing the frame in post-production to exaggerate it as it wasn't quite doing what I wanted it to do with the keyframe animation. I think works to an extent in that you definitely anticipate a drop. It definitely could have been smother and better if I changed the camera angle while it was hanging to look down over the edge, but this is what I ended up with for this project.

Staging

Like I mentioned before, I used these giant floating Legos to make it feel like the rider is immersed in a Lego world. I think the desired affect is achieved.

Arcs/Timing

I used these two principles in conjunction with each other

Final Animation

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