Car Animation Tutorial for Thea Render By Nige Copeland

IndexBasic Scene SetupCamera SetupAnimation SetupAnimation, the bodyAnimation: wheelsAnimation: CameraRendering the motion blur

ForewordThis tutorial uses Thea Render from Rev 627 and will not work with older versions; you can download the tutorial scene from the same location as this tutorial also the animated version

Basic Scene SetupI left the scene as it would typically be imported from one of the supported plug-insThe wheels and body need to be in there own groups and not nested in a main group..Ok let’s get started:Select all the parts or the car (press and hold shift) right click on the selected models and select geometry/center pivots:

This wont center the main group pivot point, but it will centre the pivots inside the group; we need adjust the pivots manually.You can simply explode the group, as you can see the pivot is forward of the front wheel, select a wheel group and use the explode option on the top tool bar:

Now select the tyre and wheel and regroup, the pivot will now be centered. Rename the new group

The other way if the above doesn’t work is to manually move the pivot point; select the front wheel, switch the view to “right”, make the view parallel, and click the fit selected to view icon, then press P on your keyboard, drag the pivot to the centre of the wheel. Then press p again or click the icon that is top left.

Then repeat either method on the other three wheelsIf you plan on doing camera target animation it would be worth centering the bodies pivot to the centre of the carI can’t stress how important it is to set the pivots first, you can’t do it later on, and the animation literally revolves around these points not the actual geometry

Camera SetupThere’s not much to do here, set the shutter speed to a low value, in our case 5.000, lower will increase the blur.

Animation Setup

Again this is straight forward, select animation from tools nav bar, select animation from under the render options, for the tutorial I set the frames to 20

By altering frame rate you can also adjust the amount of blur

Animation, the body

Select all the parts of the car and the camera, press and hold the Ctrl key to select the parts and camera.

Switch to top view, use the translate object gizmo to drag the car and camera back

Select the body group, on frame one create a key frame :

Move the slider to frame 20, use the translate object gizmo and drag the car forward

to its end position, create a key frame :

Click the rewind to first frame button and then press play , the car body will now move forward.

Animation: wheelsNow we have the car body moving but a car isn’t much good without wheels.Rewind the timeline to the first frame, change to right view and parallel view, select the car body, and right click on the body, from the list select motion then copy.

Select a wheel group, it doesn’t matter which one, double check the axis is in the centre, right click on the wheel and select motion then “paste follow” the motion from the body.

Run the animation and one wheel and the body will move up the track, but the wheel isn’t turning, we can fix that!

From Revision 627 of Thea a new transform panel was added:

With the wheel group selected, create a new Track:

Create a key frame at frame 1, advance the time line to frame 2Turn the wheel 90 degrees, I type in the number then press tab.

Thea will auto key frame, you can still do it manually if you wish to be sure.Advance to frame 4, turn the wheel to 179, advance to frame 6 and input -90,Frame 8 do -1, then do the rest in the same fashion.Why 179 and -1 opposed to 180 and 0? Like with a lot of on suite animation systems, Thea doesn’t go a full 360 there for 180 is a tipping point between +/-180, something like a wheel 179 is fine otherwise you would use 179.999 for something that needed more accuracy, likewise 0 is also a tipping point.

Now we have our wheel animated we can copy the motion from the body and “paste follow” on the other 3 wheels. Then copy track #2 from the rotating wheel.

Create a new track on each wheel and paste the motion:

Test the scene and the car will go up the track and all 4 wheels turn.

Animation: Camera

Select the car body group and copy the motion.“Paste follow” the motion onto the camera

Mount the camera and test the animation, the car and camera will move up the track

Rendering the motion blur

Make sure the Timeline is set at frame 0In the render animation options “render frames” should be set “current”In render options; make sure motion blur is checked

Select the camera and mount.Then render away!As mentioned before adjusting the shutter speed or frames per second will increase or decrease the amount of blur, you could also use depth of field as away bring the car into the foreground.

That’s the end of the tutorial, but why not try making the car turn like in Ioannis’s video tutorial.

The models in this tutorial are free to use with no restrictions, they were designed to be as simplistic as possible, if by some bizarre reason you do use then in a scene a bit of credit would be nice ;)