NAT ANSELM

Hoverboard Animation

This has been a difficult but rewarding project. I love science fiction, and my inspiration came from Scott Westerfeld’s book Uglies and the intro of this trailer. My goal was not to replicate this exactly but to come up with something similar.

Here are some renders of the hoverboard model that I made for this project.

Key skills that I gained/refined during this project:

  • Hard surface modeling
  • Decal mapping
  • Environment creation
  • Tree generation
  • Scene optimization (camera culling, object density, etc.)
  • Character and object animation

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Animation

Animation was difficult and time-consuming, to say the least. This was the first human character I ever animated.

One problem with heavy scenes like this is the lack of real-time playback, which makes it hard to gauge the speed of the animation.

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Compositing

I rendered the animation as a sequence of EXR frames with compositing turned off (which gave me more freedom with the look because it wasn’t baked-in). After rendering, I ran the frames through the compositor by themselves.

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More notes

Final editing and sound design was done in DaVinci Resolve Studio.

I’ve always found sound design difficult when dynamic-sounding objects (with varying pitch etc.) are involved. It could be a lot better. I’ll have to think of ways to get/make the exact sounds that I want.