"Wayne Manor Raceway" - slot car animation (2019)
Description: A small personal project. I have some very fond memories of slot cars from my childhood, and got the idea to make an animation while working on a poster project. While researching historic racetracks to come up with a good shape for the track, I discovered that Bruce Wayne himself was into slot cars, and decided to turn the project into an homage to both vintage toys and vintage Batman.
Workflow : Rhino3D (vectors) > Illustrator (fills & colours) > AfterEffects (animation) > Photoshop (text & GIF creation)
Inspiration. The design of the track was inspired by the slot car track in Wayne Manor, as seen in the 1967 episode "The Duo Defy" of the TV series 'Batman' (episode 94, March 30th, 1967). You can see the track in action in this video on YouTube. I simplified the design a bit for the animation, as well as cutting down the number of lanes from 4 to 2.
Time-lapse of vector/curve work in Rhino3D. I start a lot of my vector projects in Rhinoceros. Illustrator is great for a lot of things, but advanced curves and precision are not really among them. As an example, while it is technically possible to create a line tangent to two circles in Illustrator (which I needed to do for this project), it really is quite the pain. Complicated boolean operations? Good luck. Circles tangent to multiple lines? Nah. The curve tools in Rhino are much more advanced, which means I can work much faster and with more confidence.
Stills. Track without cars, screenshot from Illustrator after finishing fills & colours. The cars are loosely based on Michał Kalinowski's pixel version of a Mercedes Benz SLS AMG.