Unit 3 Designing and Staging : Blender Pre-vis

In this part of the unit, we learned how to build a pre-vis scene in Blender. This skill is very important because pre-vis is an important part of the movie-making process.

We were set the task of creating a car chase scene. We had to build the whole scene from scratch with allowances for importing pre-made assets. Our Blender tutor provided the car, lampost and rock assets. I found the canyon, road sign and grass assets online.

Building the road:

The timeline at the bottom of the screen is very useful for easy editing of the animation. By adding keyframes you can mark key moments in your animation. This allows you to easily attach cameras to keyframes to build your shots.

In our tutorials, we learned how to build roadside barriers to make our roads look more realistic. I didn't end up using the barrier for my final scene as it was set on a desert highway.

Differences in viewport modes:

Building a terrain:

Instead of just leaving the plane flat I decided to build it up so it has more depth and texture before adding an actual texture. To achieve this I added lots of edge loops and then lifted them to create hills and valleys.

HDRI's

HDRI stands for "high dynamic range imaging". This allows an environment to not just be photographed but for its luminosity details so be saved. Details such as brightness, exposure and contrast. They are very useful for filling in the background of your scenes as well as adding lighting that is similar to the environment/setting you are designing.

Building a realistic desert highway:

When I started inspecting my scene in rendered view, I noticed that in some areas my road wasn't sitting on my plane. To correct this I selected the vertices on the bezier curve and lowered and rotated them as I needed.

Camerawork:

To make the camera shake as the car drives past, you have to add a noise modifier to the location and rotation.

I liked the lighting brightness of this HDRI however some parts of the background did not , match what I wanted for my scene.

Render Test images :

In some areas, I couldn't fully lower my road without it disappearing under the plane. The image below shows the problem.

The render image tests showed me that the second car wasn't sitting flat on the road, it was slightly slanting on one side. I corrected this before rendering the final video.

Final product: