Car Crash

Matthew R. Rodwell

Matthew R. Rodwell

Well-known member
I am working on different ways to pull off a scene for a feature that requires a car crash and one option I am looking at is combining some stock aerial footage of a highway and using a high poly model of a car.

I am familiar with animating in Cinema4D but not modeling so I am considering purchasing a model from TurboSquid. My question is how difficult will it be to animate the damage of a car rolling upside down from an aerial view.

I was also thinking about shooting the crash as a POV from the front of the car going through all the motions, shakes and rotation with just the camera combined with a very good audio track. Maybe a combination of the two will help pull this off?
 
LMAO yeah if it looks anything like that I am rewriting the scene. I think having that aerial view might help me out alot. Similar to the remake of Dawn of the Dead where the van crashed into the gas station in the begining (minus the massive explosion of course)
 
Depends if you want to "Simulate" or "keyframe"

For realistic resulst you will need to do some physical simulations.

The usual methods is:

Apply softbody collison simulation then "freeze" just after impact,make a copy of the damaged shell and then re-do Hardbody simulation.
 
Thanks for the tips, it will be a couple months before I am working on this scene but I was just seeing if it was something I might be able to pull off. I will probably be asking 1,000 questions once I am working on it lol.
 
How about doing it the old fashion way and just use suggestive shots in a montage with a good sound track, ala Psycho and the shower. Now maybe you want that distant "God's eye view" feel but if want a more visceral sequence I would go for the montage. It would help if you have a sound guy around so you can get a feel for it while cutting.
 
THe added snow works OK the Hummer skid shot looks very CG. But even the snow... the falling looks good but in the hauling the body scene your there for awhile and the snow doesn't build up. It's the big give away with snow and you see it on big budget films also. Fake snow blown in the air looks SO MUCH better.
THe hummer swerve mechanically looks OK but it's TOO clean, the tires have no tread wear, the tracks don't change after they are made (falling snow should be softening them), there is no dirt or dust on anything it's just all too neat and tidy. Of course these weren't the final res versions but it wasn't detail that was missing it was "life". Maybe if you ran the whole shot through a dirt filter. It looked really good but I didn't believe it.
 
I like Anhars approach. Smush the car with a cloth mesh, freeze, then use dynamics on a solid body version of that. Makes sense.
 
Yet still another solution might be this:

Go to google map or Microsoft earth thingy, and get some ariel photo of some highway,

take screenshoots and in photoshop merge them to make one big comp,

then in AE, in the comp zoom in onto the road, and then key frame to move along the road, you can add clouds etc

Then take a photo of a car from birds eye view, and then roto it out,

place it ontop of the road photo and animate it to move along the road, you can then apply lots of blur,

For the crash you need to find a photo of the same car BUT smashed up, goto your local junk yard, make sure its the same make and colour though, take a photo from birds eye view,

In AE, you make the crash by morphing from the uncrashed to the crashed, you can even fake the car rotating and serving AND even add road marks, you can use some kind of AE filter to gradually make the tire marks appear, best to ask Matt on this :)

Add lots of smoke elements and fire and lens blur and should have a pretty convincing sequence

NO CG required, plus it will be photoreal because you are using real photos :P !

Tell me what you think.

EDIT::

You could also film the car from birds eye, and use lights to simulate it moving, and then film a smashed up car, this way it hopefully shouldn;t look "static"
 
Last edited:
Anhar Miah said:
Yet still another solution might be this:

Go to google map or Microsoft earth thingy, and get some ariel photo of some highway,

take screenshoots and in photoshop merge them to make one big comp,

then in AE, in the comp zoom in onto the road, and then key frame to move along the road, you can add clouds etc

Then take a photo of a car from birds eye view, and then roto it out,

place it ontop of the road photo and animate it to move along the road, you can then apply lots of blur,

For the crash you need to find a photo of the same car BUT smashed up, goto your local junk yard, make sure its the same make and colour though, take a photo from birds eye view,

In AE, you make the crash by morphing from the uncrashed to the crashed, you can even fake the car rotating and serving AND even add road marks, you can use some kind of AE filter to gradually make the tire marks appear, best to ask Matt on this :)

Add lots of smoke elements and fire and lens blur and should have a pretty convincing sequence

NO CG required, plus it will be photoreal because you are using real photos :P !

Tell me what you think.

EDIT::

You could also film the car from birds eye, and use lights to simulate it moving, and then film a smashed up car, this way it hopefully shouldn;t look "static"
Click to expand...

Wow that sounds like a great idea, thank you once again Anhar. I think I will play around with this idea and see how it develops.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top