Dakota Williams Capstone Blog

Guide Paths & Road Creation This week, I explored Blender's Guide Paths feature in the RBC addon, a fascinating tool that expands Blender's potential for automotive animation. The RBC addon is a great tool that simplifies and adds a great deal of convenience to the vehicle animation process. But as I was experimenting, I ran into a particular problem. I had trouble getting my model object to follow the intended guidance path smoothly. This challenge brought to light the subtleties and complexities involved in using Guide Paths and emphasized how crucial it is to grasp this area of the RBC addon. Even after the first failure, I knew that Guide Paths could improve my animations, and I was determined to get past this barrier with more research and practice. I also started to texture the road for the city scene. I got the textures from Poly Haven. 

Turntable & Exegesis Document This week I created a turntable to show the final version of the Tesla model. I also added a plane mesh backdrop with a subdivision modifier. My main focus for this week was to start creating my exegesis document for this project.

RBC Blender Addon, Animation Test, Manual Rig This is the manual rig I began to do where I applied the armature car deformation rig I then generated it which lead to implications seen within the images The rigging tutorial process I followed did not want to comply and I decided to change my rig. I then decided to use the RBC addon plugin which comes with inbuilt pre rigs. The plugin allows me to have full control over the scene and animate  The addon includes tuning, suspension and full access to expriement with physics of the rig. The newest feature offers the option to have your deisred object to collide physics.  There is an option called RBC animation which I personally expriemented with in this project. It allows you to 'recored cache' and reply recorded animations and mess around with keyframes. I found this plugin extremly helpful in terms of creative freedom allowing my vision for this project to come to life as it made work flow very user friendly.

Texturing In texturing, I mainly use the principle BSDF node which essentially is the base layer node for all shading. Using the Multiscatter GGX option allowed me to make metal-like surfaces. I didn't want to use clearcoat because if you use it larger than 1.000 it won't make the surface look realistic and not physically based. For the main body of the shape I initially had issues getting the textures on but I managed to figure it out from a tutorial. So for the front body of the car, I used a mix shader to add a bit more value to the look of the hood. For the finer details, I used a 'Voronoi Texture' linked through a 'Texture Coordinate' on the object slider leading into the roughness category. Personally, I think it also needed a colour ramp node in between so the colours didn't look so harsh.