Drift Ratz
Personal Project Created using Maya, Unreal Engine, and Nuke.
Drift Ratz is a personal project that I created in my free time to try my hand at creating an animated car chase sequence. For extra silliness, I decided to make the scene about a cat trying to catch a rat driving a Toyota Supra.
During the planning phase, I watched a lot of car chase scenes from films I loved as reference and then created a list of shot ideas I thought would work well for the project. I knew I wanted to use Unreal Engine’s city sample project as a starting point, so with a list of rough shot ideas, I opened unreal engine and began to plan out the route of the car chase. I then began placing rough cameras and stand in cars to location scout within the project to see if they would work for the kinds of shots I wanted to animate.
While planning the shots, I also began to assemble, create, and rig the assets needed for the scene (primarily the rat, getaway car, and police car). For the cat character, I decided to use the existing rig and groom I created from my sunset drive project. After assembling the assets I needed, I then textured any assets without pre-existing textures, modeled anything missing (like the rat ski mask), and then rigged all the assets so they could be animated for layout and keyframe animation.
With a set, shot list, and the assets needed, I began to create the previs and rough layout for the scene. This let me understand how the scene would feel as a sequence rather than a collection of shot ideas.
Once I was happy with how the overall sequence was feeling, I began working on the key frame animation. Here, I began polishing the motion and making sure each moment felt great.
After all the animation was complete, I brought in all the camera, rigs, and animation into Unreal engine and began lighting the shots. I wanted the chase scene to take place at night, so I created an overall night exterior lighting setup that I used as a starting point when lighting each shot. I also wanted the shots to emulate the effect of shooting through an anamorphic lens which I achieved from using this lens flare post process material from Dylan Browne.
At this point, I also worked on and completed the sound design for the scene. Now that I had an idea of how the film was going to look, I wanted to make sure the cut overall was working cohesively with sound before I moved on to the final compositing.
For the FX, I used Unreal Engine’s Niagara smoke simulator to create the smoke from the tires burning when drifting and also to create skid marks on the pavement as the cars would drift through the shot. I then rendered these elements on separate render layers using Unreal’s Movie Render Graph so I could have more control over how they would look in the composite within Nuke.
Since I wanted the scene to feel like it was filmed with an anamorphic lens, I made sure to render out a depth pass from Unreal Engine, then created the depth of field effect using the PXF Z Defocus add on from Pixel Fudger and adjusted the shape of the bokeh within the node to look like the oval shaped bokeh an anamorphic lens would produce. Lastly, I added some lens distortion in Nuke for a few of the wider lens shots to emulate the lens distortion you might get in a wider lens.
Once all of the compositing was completed, there were a few final touches needed before finishing the project. I color graded the shots in Da Vinci Resolve and then created the end title graphic.
For the end title, I wanted to make something that felt like a graffiti tag, since the scene centers around the street rat getting away. Within After Effects, I created the end title animation to appear like graffiti being sprayed on the scene. Here was the final result.
