Production 4.2

Screenshots of Process (with annotations)

Standard Kart

Below is an image of the first iteration of the finished model

I loaded the finished model into my slicing software;

B Dasher

These are the reference images I used for modelling.

I decided to screen record a lot of the process of making this model and I've added the video down below. The process was largely the same as making the standard kart - copy some reference images and change some bits and bobs here and there to make it good for 3D printing. I also used a couple bits from the standard kart - the Mario logo on the front of the kart as well as the seat (which isn't shown in the video - I only recorded about the first half of the total modelling process).

You may notice in the video that I downloaded a 3D model of this kart that someone else had made. This wasn't me cheating or taking parts from it, rather I set it up and took screenshots of it that I could use as reference images. I didn't exactly follow those reference images as I'm aware that because it's a model that someone else had made, it likely wasn't 100% correct. I also had to change bits anyway to accommodate for 3D printing.

Once I'd finished modelling, I loaded the model up into my 3D printer slicing software. I noticed that there were some supports underneath the car, so what I did is I went back and made the bottom more flat. In the middle image below you'll also see that there was a support coming in from the left hand side which I didn't want, so what I did was I made it so that the hexagon, where the 'suspension' attaches to the car, had the exhaust resting on top of it, which meant there didn't have to be any supports there. I've added images below of the printed model with these fixes made.

Below is an image of the first finished model

So it was back to blender. What I did is I removed the 'sidepods' from the kart, which meant I could scale everything down apart from the seat - I want to keep the seat the same size so that I may only have to design one character that can fit in both (if it comes to it).

Toad

Originally I was going to model Mario, but at the time of writing I have 3.5 weeks until the deadline so I'm going to have to save time wherever I can, so I chose to model Toad instead as he's much simpler to model.

I must admit I completely forgot to either record the modelling process or document it while I was modelling the character, but the process was very simple. I basically got a cube, subdivided it (rounded it), stretched it into shape aaand moved on to the next object. I've still added some photos below of individual objects that make up the character to show this.

Shell

Modelling the shell was quite a pain. I ended up basically just following a YouTube tutorial (linked below) which helped me figure out how I was actually meant to get the shapes I eventually did. I did record some of the process though, but it's a lot of me faffing, experimenting with things, getting it wrong, undoing etc etc.

https://youtube.com/shorts/0XB-U-DoBh0?si=7prGpg9g_U_riIfH

Like I said, that video doesn't show the whole modelling process. I've added some images below of the finished model.

The Animation

I finally started to get to the point where I can see everything coming together. With all the 3D models finished, I loaded up a new blender project and started animating. Below is a video of the first animation.

What I did was I animated everything, and then took each individual frame and copied and pasted it into another Blender project where I laid out every single frame onto a mock zoetrope. I did this animation just to map out where everything would be. You can see that there is no movement in the karts, there's no motion in the character's arm when he throws the shell and it all just looks a bit rubbish. But I was able to work with this well and develop the animation, as it helped me develop my understanding of how an animation works on a zoetrope.

One problem I had was that when the B Dasher was hit by the shell, it was facing in a really odd direction. It genuinely looked like the two karts were travelling in different directions. Because I've got 20 frames, each frame has to be (360/20) degrees apart, which works out to 18 degrees. Because the B Dasher is effectively one frame ahead of the standard kart, because the whole thing is arranged on a circular platform, the B Dasher has to be rotated 18 degrees, something I would never have figured out unless I loaded the animation onto a mock zoetrope first. 

I re-did the animation a little bit and I made it so that the karts have a sort of hovering effect just so it doesn't look like they're completely stationary the whole time. I also animated the character's arm throwing the shell. Finally, I added some colour as these would be the colours I use when I have the physical thing ready.

The Animation Again

So I had a problem with the last animation - there's so many different objects to print and I have roughly 2 weeks to actually get something working so I needed to change that up. So what I've done instead is I've made a slightly shorter animation and now there's only 2 different objects per frame, instead of 3. Basically printing is much quicker and there's less physical assembly etc to do which will save a lot of time.

Measurements

Bad news
Just found out that my 3D printed models at the moment are currently 3X bigger than they actually can be, and they're already pretty small. For a bit of context, I decided to measure up my 3D render of a zoetrope in Blender and then see how big it would be in real life. It was 1 meter in diameter, which is a tad large. Thankfully though a few weeks ago a lady came in and donated a bunch of old animation toys and kits to the college, and in that was a platform for a zoetrope. The platform for the zoetrope was 32cm in diameter, a third of what I had in Blender. So I've had to now make my 3D models 3 times smaller just so they can actually fit on the zoetrope, and when they're that small I'm not convinced the detail will be very good at all. So I've basically got to wait and see how this 3D print goes and if it doesn't work I'm going to have a lot more head scratching to do on top of everything else. One thing I could do is to just do something like a 12 frame animation, and make it so that it's only 1 kart in the animation - sure it's not as impressive as what I had originally planned, but with how little time I've now got, it may be an option. Besides, the main point of this project is to get a zoetrope up and running, so even if the animation is a bit simpler than originally intended, I'll still be happy that I achieved my main goal.

Good news
The 3x smaller 3D print worked, and the detail is surprisingly good at this scale. One thing that really impressed me was that even the 'M' on the front of the kart is still just about visible.

Below is a comparison between the same kart printed with a 0.4mm nozzle and with a 0.2mm nozzle. The image on the right is quite poor quality but I'm hoping that you can still see the difference in quality.

However even this print wasn't perfect. When I printed all of them, because of the shape of the wheels and the angle of the exhaust pipes, it meant that there were still some supports. Because of how small it is, when I took the supports off it just naturally pulled of some of the filament on the main model as well leaving a pretty ugly finish. So I went back into blender and changed the exhaust pipes so that they are now sitting at a 30 degree angle (similar to what I did with the B Dasher model) and made the bottom of the wheels go straight down, rather than being rounded. Of course I still had to have a hole to put the mount in and I changed this also to a 30 degree angle which again means it doesn't need supports.

Here's the results in the slicing software - supports show up as green making them very easy to spot, and you can see here that there are no supports needed anywhere.

The beauty of this as well is that to print 9 karts at this scale without any supports uses up less filament than printing just one kart at the bigger scale with supports. This is great because the whole zoetrope is going to weigh pretty much nothing which means I don't have to worry about burning out the motor on whatever I'll use to spin it (likely a record player).

Painting

I used one of my days off to shop online for some paints. I already had Mephiston red (quite a dark red) and when I was in the Warhammer shop, they said that I'd want to get a lighter red to dry brush with. So I found a colour called "Wild Rider Red." I needed to decide what type of paint it would be though - layer, base, shade etc - so I referred back to my research on paints and decided to go for the 'layer' type paint. I also bought a brush so again I referred back to my research and chose to get a 'Medium Layer Brush' as these are soft and quite durable. Also the brush itself is quite small which is good for working at such a small scale as I am.

While those paints are on the way, I decided to have a quick experiment with painting as I had 18 tiny Mario karts lying around. I was aware that I'd experiment with different looks and would get some stuff wrong, so I was aware that I would therefore have to potentially 3D print some more karts which isn't a problem as the cost per kart is £0.0197. Below are some images of some different looks I experimented with - I did try painting the whole thing solid red at first, but I quickly realised I wasn't going to be able to get into all the little crevices here and there, so I'd have to try something else. It goes from my favourite look on the left to my least favourite on the right.

I like the one on the far left the most because, well, it looks cool, but also because it's fairly easy to paint using some funky techniques I learned while at a Warhammer shop. The only problem is that I managed to get a tiny bit of red paint onto the seat, but that can be easily fixed by going over it again in black, plus I'll just get better at painting (you'd hope) after doing the same thing 18 times. I also prefer this to my next favourite one because when you look at it from the front, you can see a lot of red - the front is red and the sidepods are red, whereas with the other one only the very sides of the sidepods are red, which doesn't make it pop as much and therefore makes my colour theory research a bit pointless.

Good news - I completely forgot that I was going to drybrush the models which will make the whole model look red, rather than there just being a few spots that look red. I started off by painting the front bumper of the kart in red, as well as the sidepods. I did this to 3 karts at a time, and then when I finished painting the last of the 3 karts I went on to dry brushing. I had a much lighter red to dry brush with as this was what an employee in the Warhammer shop I went to suggested. This made for quite a cool effect and also made the whole model red which now does line up with my colour theory research which is a nice added bonus.

Here's a video to show the process of painting. You'll find it hard to see exactly what I'm doing, but I'm just painting the front bumper and sidepods red. To make sure I didn't paint areas I didn't want to, I would use the side of the brush to paint details. This was particularly helpful when painting the sidepods in order to make sure I didn't get any paint into the little crevices.

Here's a video to show the process of dry brushing. Again it's difficult to see exactly what I'm doing but I basically get a tiny ibt of paint on the brush, then wipe the brush until almost no paint is coming off and then start brushing over the model.

The Platform

For the platform, after talking with my tutors about it I decided to get the 3D workshop at college to make me a platform. The process is fairly simple - design the platform in blender and subtract the mounts for the karts from the platform, take an orthographic (no perspective) screenshot of it from above, give that to someone called Jason who would then convert it into a dxf file which can then be handed on to the 3D workshop who can use the laser cutter to cut and etch a piece of wood to make my platform.

Turns out I had to convert the blender file into a dxf, and not a jpg or png file. So that's what I did. What happens when you convert a Blender file into a dxf is it gets every line of the mesh and basically makes it an outline. It's as if you're looking straight down on the model at the wireframe. 

Well it wouldn't burn it out if I was actually going to use a record player which provides a nice segway into the 8 millionth problem of this project. After 3D printing all the karts and all the mounts to the correct size, carefully measuring up the size of the platform in Blender and going through the whole process of getting it ready for the laser cutter, and finally making the platform which seemed like the last little hurdle of this project, I discovered that I made the thing too big to fit on a bally record player.

Thankfully my tutors once again came in to the rescue and we have a couple of solutions. One is that we can simply just put something underneath the platform to prop the zoetrope up a bit so that it doesn't hit the needle on the record player. Another is that we use a turntable which college have. The turntable is just basically a spinning circle, nothing to get in the way of the platform. So it's not the end of the world and I should still be able to get the thing spinning and 'viewable.' Now I've just got to hope and pray that the mounts actually fit in the slots because if they don't I have no clue what I'll do. If I really really really wanted to get this thing to fit on a record player, I'd have to go and re-size the whole zoetrope (platform, karts, mounts, everything) and make sure it would actually fit onto the record player, 3D print everything again, and then go and make the platform again. That means in total I would've printed 45 karts just to get to the final product and that's not even including all the karts I made previously that were 8cm long instead of 2.6cm.

Assembly

I took the day of college to paint my models at home, and before I started painting I made sure that all the mounts would actually fit into the holes that I'd made in the platform (which I also took home). Thankfully they did all fit, however I noticed that it was hard to get all of them to stay at exactly the same height and to be perfectly flat. A solution I came up with was to have something either side of the kart while the glue was setting (I used super glue to set the karts and bananas in place), so that it would be perfectly flat. I managed to find some bits of wood that were funnily enough part of a pre-made zoetrope platform and they were the perfect height for what I needed. Here's an image to show what I did;

So with the zoetrope completed, the only thing left to do was spin it and somehow make a strobe effect. Because I'm not actually presenting the zoetrope for about another month yet, I don't have to worry about concerns with epileptic viewers, so we just used a strobe light that was donated to the college. We used a roll of sellotape to prop the zoetrope above the needle of the record player which meant everything was finally ready to go. Also the platform not fitting directly on a record player was almost a blessing in disguise as the record player's needle would've been right in the way of the animation.

The Final Product

Finally, the bit we've all been waiting for. The climax of this thrilling google sites, of this project, of my 2 years here at HCA.

Just a heads up there are flashing lights in the first 2 videos below.

And there you have it, a working zoetrope. Unfortunately it's quite hard to see it on video thanks to the sort of rolling shutter effect which blacks out the screen quite often, but the effect in real life is mesmerising. The animation is also going too quick - you'll notice that the karts are flying around the place at the speed of light and it's really hard to track one of them. This isn't an error I made, rather it's because of the speed of the strobe light. I tried working around this by downloading a strobe light app on my phone, but when I used it the animation looked blurry even though I managed to get the animation playing at the right speed. I've got a video below to show that but again it's quite hard to see thanks to the rolling shutter effect. Again there are flashing lights in the following video that are a lot more intense than the last one.

Although this is mildly annoying, I still got a zoetrope working which was the main goal. These strobe light problems aren't that hard to fix and are something I only really need to worry about for the summer show and future presentation.

Update: my college tutor has an app on his phone which allows him to take a photo of a zoetrope and it then turns that into an animation. Here's the result below, you can see that it's much clearer than the video above.

We also managed to get a camera set up at college to record the zoetrope. I wanted to use a proper video camera as there's be more flexibility with the settings plus I won't get the rolling shutter effect. Here's the video;

And this is the final video - I slowed it down to show the speed I actually want. So with all going well this is the pace that at which I'll have the zoetrope.

Link back to Research

Obviously I've done a fair bit of research on Mario Kart and its audience, but mainly on zoetropes. I've also effectively been researching and finding stuff out while I've been animating and printing. For example, when I did the animation of the kart I just simply got the kart to spin and move backwards - but of course I can't do that because it's on a circular platform, so the kart has to rotate by x amount of degrees about the centre of the platform.

I also applied this knowledge by choosing to sacrifice on the steering wheel. Printing it would've first of all meant that I had to have supports built on the kart itself which I didn't really want as I ran the risk of pulling up bits of filament and ruining the surface of the kart model, and also it would've used up more filament. So I chose to not print the steering wheel and rather than focussing on the tiny, minute details, focus on the bigger picture and the project as a whole.

I also researched colour theory to enable my storytelling skills. I looked into what different colours tend to represent for different characters, and I found that red and black are commonly associated with villains, and that white and blue are associated with good characters. I chose to implement these colours into my project by having the colour of the kart being driven by the evil character red, and the character itself, black. I then had the good character and the kart that it was driving white.

The very first thing I mentioned in my research section was the persistence of vision theory. Of course I don't have any control over the way the human eye perceives animations - that's just they way humans have been created. However my zoetrope still plays to the optical illusion that is the persistence of vision. This Victorian animation toy with a modern day twist 

Connection between planning and finished product

In my planning section I made a little storyboard of my animation. It consisted of 2 karts - one throwing a shell and the other being hit by it and falling back. You can see in production how that changed over time, but fundamentally it is still the same animation - a kart gets hit by a projectile that was put there by another kart, gets spun round and drops back one slot.

I also did some test dry brushing. This was just to get a feel for what dry brushing is like, how much paint to use etc. This came in handy when I was dry brushing my kart models as I'd already had experience with dry brushing, plus I'd done some research into it.

On the topic of painting I also spoke about painting my character entirely red. While I didn't end up using any characters in the end, I still painted the karts red rather than having them entirely black, as that is a lot more boring to look at, plus it makes painting very difficult when I'm trying to dry brush my models which would make it look more white. This also links back to my colour theory research when I was talking about how evil characters in stories are typically associated with red and black.

Reflecting Back to Schedule

I noticed a lot going through this project that there were many things I didn't account for in my production schedule gantt chart - things like time spent 3D printing, print fails, sorting out a spinning platform and getting that platform to spin, how I'm going to make that platform hold the individual objects of the animation etc etc. The production schedule has changed a lot since the first iteration.

The schedule was very useful though. I'd often forget in the writing stages of this project what exactly I was meant to be doing, so having a production schedule which outlined everything for me helped keep me on track. It also got me to work harder because I could see that I maybe only had 2 days left on something and then I had to move on to something else, so it was also a good motivation boost and made me work harder.

Suitability for Target Audience

When I researched my target audience, I noticed that Nintendo users tend to be people of the chardonnay personality type - very positive and 'yes oriented' people. When I think of someone being positive and creative, I instantly think to colourful. With my new animation I've chosen to keep the kart red (mainly because I've already bought the paint) because the singular character in the animation is still technically a bad character - they still attack the kart behind by throwing a banana peel at them, so red still does suit them. I know the colours aren't as ideal as they would've been if I'd stuck with the first animation idea I had, and I spoke earlier about the colours I chose with the first animation which I was really pleased with, but this is just a sacrifice I have to make to give myself enough time to have a physical product at the end of this project.

The point of this project was to have a physical zoetrope made by the deadline and for it to put a smile on people's faces, hence why I chose to do a Mario kart animation. Despite some changes along the way (only having one kart, no characters in the kart due to a lack of time, changing the animation) I believe this would still appeal to people of the chardonnay personality type thanks to the fun and playful nature of Mario kart and therefore my animation, the use of colours on the kart as well as the humour side of things, in watching a kart get hit by a banana over and over and over again.