Project 4: Motion Path Ride

Kristine Tseng 3/25/2020

Storyboard

I wanted to make a roller coaster ride based off of a mouse trying to steal a block of cheese in a kitchen. I sketched out what I was aiming for the kitchen to look like, then tried to model a matching kitchen.

Based on the sketches, I made this storyboard.

I originally planned for the roller coaster car to be visible in the shot, but I found that it obscured so much of the shot that most of the time the track was not visible. I also ran into trouble during animation when it kept passing through the track, probably due to the changing camera angle.

I modeled the cabinets, counters, and walls with cubes and planes. The rest of the furniture and appliances were models I found online: sink, faucet, vent hood, stools, lights, cheese.

I modeled both side rails of the track by extruding a cylinder along a curve. For the second side rail I duplicated the first curve, placed the new curve next to it, and adjusted the control points so that they were adjacent to each other. It was very difficult trying to keep the distance between the two rails consistent along the entirety of the track.

For the rungs of the track, I started off by making one cylinder, repeating it a lot of times with a MASH deformer, and using curve wrap to try to wrap it to one of the curves of the side rails. This only worked for the first section of the track because it was flat. The rest of the track was too curvy to get the rungs to realistically fit between the two sides by just using curve wrap so for most of the track I had to manually place each rail individually.

Animation

The final animation of the ride

Animation principles

1. Anticipation

The coaster has two drops. Before each of these drops, the car slows down significantly to anticipate the drop and to scare the riders.

There is also anticipation in the beginning of the ride when the rider looks up at the cheese on the shelf, showing how high and far away it is so that the viewer will be excited for the rest of the ride.

The cheese that is shown at the beginning of the ride is actually exaggerated in size. The actual cheese that the roller coaster car circles at the peak of the ride is much smaller than this cheese. I made this cheese bigger both for exaggeration, and also so that it would be more visible from the low vantage point of the ground.

2. Timing

Animating the speed of the car required varying the timing a lot along the motion path to get the effect I wanted. To adjust the speed I set points on the motion path and varied the number of frames between each of the points. Having fewer frames between 2 points made the car go faster and having more frames between 2 points made the car go slower.

3. Slow in and Slow out

Generally the roller coaster car slowly ascends a hill, descends quickly, and slows down as it exits the drop. I did this to try to make the animation look more realistic.

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