A Reversing Beginner

Type 3D Animation
Timeline November 2024
Tools Maya / Substance 3D Painter / After Effects / Illustrator
Role 3D Designer & Animator

Overview

A Reversing Beginner is a one-minute original 3D animation. A small yellow car casually pulls into an empty parking lot. Some time later, the lot is full, and the car clumsily tries to reverse, bumping into the vehicles around it. After a long struggle, it finally makes its way out. Then the camera pulls back, and the entire parking lot is sitting inside a transparent toy box.

Process

Texturing

All surfaces in the scene were textured in Substance 3D Painter. For the car, the main subject of the piece, I chose a yellow cardboard-like finish to suggest a handcrafted, toy-like feel. About the parking lot, I drew the lane markings, directional arrows, and accessible parking symbols as vectors in Illustrator, then brought them into Substance and composited them into the ground texture, so that the parking lot surface could stay as a single clean plane.

Texturing — car texture maps and rendered car
Texturing — parking lot texture maps and rendered parking lot

Motion Path

The car's movement follows CV curves drawn directly in the scene.

Wheel Rigging

The wheels are rigged to rotate automatically based on the car's forward motion.