The Tank Race

I created the tank with the intention of compositing it into real footage. Over on the Blender Subreddit, the contest this month was racing, so I decided to do that first.

This is my first animation with sound included. I’ve done a good bit with music creation in LMMS, Hydrogen, and Audacity so I already knew how to use the tools. Not sure if I’m going to do any more audio tweaking with this animation, since I already have an idea for a sequel.

I spent about three days making the tank, and about two weeks texturing it. I used Substance painter and went through a few iterations before I was satisfied with it. However, I have not yet perfected the node layout to properly translate Substance Painter exports into Blender Cycles yet. I was using a Geforce GTX 560 but Substance Painter was practically unusable. Click to add rust, wait 10-15 seconds for it to load, see that the jitter put it up to high, ctrl-z, click again, etc. I ended up upgrading to a GTX 770. Newegg had a couple refurbished ones for half price.

The environment leaves a little to be desired, but after the nightmare of waiting over two weeks for my previous animation to render, I said screw it, it can be bare. And badly textured.

C&C about anything?

Neat animation! Can’t think of anything to critique, keep up the good work. Check out some of Andrew Price’s tutorials on materials in cycles - you’ll be up and running in no time.

Very nice and funny! The sounds make a big part of this too.

I agree with Jared, if you worked on the materials, maybe added some bump maps or something it could look even better