Original subtitles

Let's do some speed lines! and what better to use than our fuzzy car here :)

let's make this thing feel like it's going super fast, that's the point of these speed

lines really, to drop out all detail and just be left with the feeling, it's an impressionistic

abstract representation of all that blurry scenery going past, so we can be pretty loose and fast

with it so to speak. let's start by hiding what we don't need, actually i'm going to go Alt H

and just see what pops up, so we have this car original so i'm going to click on these two icons

just to make sure it doesn't show up in the render and won't show up again if we do Alt H. let's just

give ourselves a little bit more space and scroll down a little further, all the particles, i'm

going to disable that collection and the sphere at the bottom here let's do the same thing as we did

with the original car, just disable those two. the light that we have here also we don't need that

for this technique and that should do it i think if we just rotate around the scene and see what

we've got, that's looking pretty good, i'm just going to zoom in a little bit on the car and then

just press Control Alt and 0 on the numpad just to snap the camera to something like about this

now the basis of this technique is to not actually animate the position of the car, i'm actually just

going to be whizzing a texture past the car just to give the illusion of that speed, first of all

though i'll select it and go Shift S and snap our cursor to the selected and then let's start with

a cube i'm gonna do this in wireframe take a look from the top view scale that up so that it's about

three r four car widths wide, from the front i'm gonna move it up on the z axis so that the wheels

are more or less touching the ground but i'm to give this the sense of it floating slightly,

i'm going to press 1 to make sure that we're in vertex selection, left click and drag across the

top and then G and then Z just to flatten that down a little bit so it's wider than it is tall,

next up let's take a look from the top view and then what i'll do here is press G and then Y just

to move it up from this angle a little bit, so the car is more or less in the middle there and then

i'm going to stretch it out along this axis which is the y axis as we can see there so S and then Y

and then i'm going to scale it way out, i'm actually going to scale it ridiculously

out on that axis but i'll do that later for now that's good enough, now i'm going to jump over

to the uv editing workspace and press the period on the numpad, take a look at what we've got i'm

going to press 3 to select these two faces, i'm gonna press X to delete them i might add them back

though eventually but for now they are gone, i'm gonna press two and select this edge and go Ctrl E

and mark a seam there and then select everything with a and then U tu unwrap, now i think that's

all right but i'm going to drag those all the way across press N to open up our sidebar and that

x-axis there i'm going to turn that to 1. just so that our uvs are taking the maximum uv space here,

that's our uv editing done i'm going to jump back to the shading workspace and switch from the

geometry nodes over to a shader editor and click on the new material. let's call this tunnel and

we'll get rid of the principled shader and we'll create an emission shader instead, so let's just

drop that in, hook it up to the surface and take a look in rendered view, now at the moment we can

see the inside and the outside of this, which i don't really want so i'm going to come over to the

material properties, down towards the settings and i'm going to set this to backface culling

and now we can't see the inside which is the opposite of what we want, so what i'm going to do

is tab into edit mode, with all the faces selected i'm going to go Alt N to bring up our normals menu

and then i'm going to flip those faces and that's the kind of thing we want, so the essence of this

technique is to just stretch the texture down the tunnel, so let's go shift a and add in a texture,

image texture and then what we've already got in the scene in this case is the hdri

so if we plug that into our emission and press Ctrl T thanks to our Node Wrangler add-on we'll

create these nodes which as we can see by default is already plugged into our uvs, so we've got a

seam up there, but the cool thing about an hdri is if i left click and scrub along the x location

here we can see it's perfectly seamless and it's just repeating a pattern there, that's basically

the idea we want and this seam isn't really going to be an issue once we really stretch things out

and for that we can use our x-axis, so if i take this really low like 0.05 for example

and then let's move our x location again, we're starting to get a really good sense of speed,

let's enhance this a little further by adding some additional contrast into this with the color rgb

curves node and i'll drop that in there and then from this left point here we can cut off some of

the black areas like this, let's again scrub through a little bit more of the animation,

different areas of the image are gonna show quite differently, so at this point here for example,

maybe we could crunch this in even further and we can reduce the output by dropping

our top right point here, something like this maybe add a little bit of curvature into this

just to soften the falloff between different brightness levels and let's scrub through a little

further, so we're getting almost completely black areas in places, let's maybe pull the dark areas

further to the left just to try and introduce a little bit more into the darks then something

like that and i think that's looking pretty good. now this at the moment is actually not very long,

we can see from the camera's point of view for example, if we were to take a look we're not

really getting much of the tunnel before we just get a big opening there, so we're going to stretch

this tunnel right out. let's press N to open up our sidebar, let's find the item area where we

can see our actual true dimensions and i'm going to set this to something like 12 000 so it's super

long. now for that we might need to take a look at our camera, just to make sure that we have

our clipping settings long enough to handle it, so we're going to need above a kilometer here,

just to be on the safe side i'm just going to make that 10 times so adding an extra zero there

similarly for the camera in our view, let's add an additional zero onto there, so here's

how it looks now and here it is without the extra zero, you can see it cuts off quite a lot there,

so let's add that back in and take a look from this camera again, so that's looking pretty good,

i think we can fade that out at the edges though, so let's take this give this a little bit of space

and what we'll do is we'll take our texture coordinates and then we'll separate this, so

we'll go converter, separate xyz and plug in our generated coordinates, because this is essentially

the bounding box, we could probably use our uvs on this as well though because that covers the zero

to one space as well but from here i'm going to Ctrl Shift click on this just to see the x axis

which we can see moving pretty much from left to right, our y-axis is going from one end where it's

black all the way to the other where it's white, so this is what we need i'm gonna take a converter

color ramp node so that it's just bright in the middle so i'm gonna create a mask basically, so

this perfectly in the center at 0.5 and then ctrl left click on another point and then i'm going to

set this to one and i'm going to set that to black and now if we come over to here and add in a color

mix rgb node and plug this into the mix factor that way we can move this into the second socket,

so wherever this input is white it's going to do what's coming out of the second socket,

so i'm going to turn this to black which means that now in the middle it's going to use this

texture and at the very ends it's going to fade it out to black which we can just about see there

so let's jump back into the view and we can see it's starting to fade there towards the end. if we

want to adjust this a little bit what we can do is add in a converter, math node, set this to power,

Ctrl Shift click on this to see it and then as we scroll this up we can see that fade that fall off

changing. now i think this is probably actually perfectly fine at say something like 1 which isn't

actually using that power node at all but if we find we need to adjust it that's there ready to go

so Ctrl Shift click on the emission again and let's scrub through, the x location again to see

how it's going. the effect is pretty extreme so i'm going to hold Shift and just try and get a slower

a slower translation, now that we'll stretch it right out i think maybe this scale is a little bit

too stretched, so i'm going to set that to something more like 0.2, now let's just

translate this a little bit again and so we've still retained a little bit of texture, a little

bit of interest in that texture as it whizzes by the camera. as we scroll through the location here

we might notice that there's a big bright flash, then we get some reddish lines towards the bottom

and then there's a big bright flash and then some reddish lines across the bottom and so on

and so forth, as the texture is basically looping around, so there is a little bit of a limitation

to what we can do with this particular technique so let's pair this scrolling of a texture with a

more procedural approach and mix them together, so i'm going to take all of these nodes and duplicate

them, bring them down and instead of the image texture i'm going to go Shift S thanks to the

node wrangler add-on and we can swap or switch and texture node into a noise texture. now at this

point i'm going to Control Shift-click on our rgb curves and instead of using the uvs i'm going to

use the object, this is so that we can get unique positions basically infinitely so this is never

going to repeat for us. so that this makes a little bit more sense, what we're going to need to do

is apply our scale, as you can see our scale is pretty much off the charts here so i'm going to

Control A and apply the scale, this makes the noise kind of pretty strange looking, so i'm going to

reset the scale value on here to 1 and the scale of the noise is just way too small. so we're going

to make it much bigger by scrolling this down to a much lower value somewhere around 0.1. let's add

some extra detail into it and perhaps a little bit of extra distortion to give it a little bit of a

swirliness to it and from here we'll adjust our scale in our vector mapping node and let's take

this right down so that it's around 0.01, then in our rgb curves let's take this and pull that

right back up and we'll increase the contrast by dragging this bottom left point all the way along

somewhere around here and now we're darkening quite a lot of it and just getting a lot of the

interesting colors. a lot of these colors are a little bit on the harsh side, a little bit extreme

so let's break out our color hue saturation node and we'll drop that in there from here

what we'll do is we'll drop our saturation down a little bit, you can see a little bit of the light

white starting to drop in there, that's pretty good and now what we can do is combine these

together in a moment, but let's just check this is working by holding Shift and left clicking on our

x location, we see that's not actually going the right way, so it's going to need to come along the

y axis instead in this case but that's looking pretty good, the next thing i want is just one

value to control both of these so that it's the x-axis on here and the y-axis on here, but i just

want the same value to plug into both, so for that i'm going to need to create an xyz combined node

so we have 1 there and we have 1 for our procedural texture and now all we need to do is

input a single value and plug them into what we need, so it's the x axis on the top one, so let's

plug that through to there and on this one it's going to be the y axis and let's plug that through

into there, now with that done i'm going to Shift and left click on here, just to see the two

starting to move or at least we need to combine these two first to be able to see that, so let's

left click and drag these over there to create some space, Shift D to duplicate this one and

we'll add these two together, so let's change this from mix to add and we'll take it all the way up

and Ctrl Shift click on this one and so we'll be able to see just the texture and then there's our

procedural noise being added on top and now let's come over to the value node that we just created

Shift left click on this to see what we've got and when this value starts to go down, this looks like

it's working pretty well, now i think one needs to go a little bit slower than the other, so i think

the texture needs to go a little bit slower, so i'm going to take a converter, math node here and

just take whatever we're plugging into this and just divide it a little bit, so by dividing by say

50 and now let's try moving this, we're changing the speed of how fast the image texture can

zoom down our corridor, so let's pop out of the camera view for a moment and i'm just going to

select the car and press . on the numpad just to reorient the camera a little bit and then let's

just zoom out here a little bit re-select the tunnel, so let's just verify what's happening here

so Ctrl Shift click on just the texture, let's take a look at what happens as we change this value

so as it goes down, the texture is zooming towards us, but we want that effect to be the other way, so

to make it look like the car is zooming down here we're going to need this to be going this value to

be going positively, but let's slow this down even more maybe make it even more obvious, so divide by

200 and then as we increase this, that now looks like the noise is going the correct way so to

invert this what i'm going to do again Shift D to duplicate and then turn that into a multiply node

and let's just multiply it by -1, now as we drop this down it's going the same way as

the noise texture the procedural noise texture down here should go, so let's just test that

so Ctrl Shift click on this one here and as we drop this node down as we drop this value down

the noise should be scrolling from left to right which it is, so let's put these two noises together

again, so Ctrl Shift click here where they're added together and now as we drop this value down

both noises should be traveling the same direction and roughly at the same speed, they don't have to

be exact, but just so that one isn't too crazily different than the other one, so we're just about

done with this tunnel, an extra bit of control i'd like to add though is just duplicating this

colormix rgb node, Ctrl Shift clicking on our end emission shader there and instead of adding this

white what i'd like to do instead is multiply some white which means basically the values of

one are being multiplied onto something so nothing is going to happen in other words :) so the only real

purpose of this node is to just tint the color just give it a slightly more push to a general

uniform color, so i'm going to take this towards the oranges a little bit somewhere around there

or something else that we can do is tweak our strength but we can refine that to taste a little

bit later on, to actually add some animation into this what we can do is create a driver, i find the

easiest way to do this is to just go #frame when it's a very linear animation required, so with

that now whatever frame it is, is the value that's going to show up in here and as you can see we're

on frame 64. pressing space there we can see the rough speed of that, so that's going the wrong way

because it's going obviously a positive value so i'm just going to *this by negative one and

let's play that again and now things are moving in the right direction to be able to control the

speed of this we can just divide by a certain number or we can multiply it by something if

we want to speed it up well technically not to get too mass heavy but we could just divide by

something to actually speed it up and slow it down depending on whether it's above or below 1 but

i'm sure you get the point. the final piece of the puzzle here though as you've probably not failed

to notice is that the car is totally black, it's not actually receiving any lighting, to fix that

we're going to need to switch from the object to the world and what we have in our nodes already

from an earlier experiment is this circus arena 2k dot hdr from hdri haven, let's plug that in, it's

the same hdri that we're actually using to stretch along our corridor here and now finally we can

see what we're doing, we see the car, almost ghostly otherworldly, racing its way to the

uh car afterlife of some kind :) so currently it's going to look kind of static on the reflections

and to adjust this we're just going to go Ctrl T on this to create these texture coordinates and

mapping nodes and from here we can just change the rotation. rotating it along the x is going to give

it that sense of kind of a light passing above it all the time which i think works quite well

and again it's just a simple linear change so we can just write #frame and we can press play

and we'll see that whizzing across the car now and again this is just a matter of adjusting the speed

by dividing or multiplying by a set number. this looks a bit strange because obviously it's frame

36 and over here it says 2063 degrees or something but i think because of the conversion between

radians and so forth, i think this is just getting converted in the view for us, so don't worry too

much about that figure being not just simply 36. let's just give this a little bit of polish,

so come over to the object, so we can see our regular tunnel shader and let's come over to one

of the end color mix rgb nodes here, this one and let's just clamp the results and we'll probably

notice that this kind of strange saturated look that we're getting here should go away

so let's click on the clamp and we can see the before and after there, i think that looks a lot

more correct now because the results that we get out of the rgb curves node can be pretty extreme

way above one or way below zero and that can sometimes create weird issues clamping just

means we're limiting our values to not be outside of that zero to one range and that's just helping

things to behave a little bit better. next let's come out of the tunnel and see that the actual

background is transparent, so i'm going to change that because the background could just be black

we're not really going to see very much apart from the very very ends of the tunnel and just

so that that isn't messing us up in any way where it shows up as transparent i just want to set this

as concrete, so i'm going to come over to the film setting and uncheck the transparent option and now

we can see our world shader so let's jump over to our world and come and split the light path

information here, so we don't want to actually see it when the camera is looking at it here we just

want it to affect reflections and things, so we're going to go input and light path, drop that in and

then we're going to mix between two background shaders, luckily this is black already so that's

going to be pretty easy to mix between, so let's add that in, put this into the first socket and the

camera array can go into the mix factor and actually we've got these the wrong way around

so i'm just going to left click and drag those and that should flip them around for us, i'm just going

to go shift alt and Z in the viewport so we're getting rid of all of the viewport overlays there

and let's just zoom in on what we've got here now pressing Space and we're getting something looking

pretty good, i think the car itself could have a little bit of tweaking to it, so let's come over

to the modifiers and give this a little bit more density, so 15 and we're getting really fluffy now!

and on the dark stuff i'm gonna crank that up to a full one, okay we're on maximum fluff now, let's

press play again and it's looking pretty good i think all that's left on this is to actually add

some camera animation, so 0 on the numpad to take a look and what we can do is find a first

position so let's take this down and frame it up a little bit, so once jumping into the camera view

what we can do is press Shift and i think it's the Accent Grave which is to the left of my number

one above the qwerty keyboard and then we get a kind of wasd kind of like a first person controls

so i can look around with the mouse and use wasd to move around and q and e to go straight up and

down, i find this is actually quite a good way to control the camera for animation, as it can be

quite uh natural looking, as though you're just shakily trying to hold the camera... the vehicle

which has gone to work quite well in this case i think so here i'm going to set this to a timeline

and let's come over and extend the output of this so let's set it to say something like 2000 frames

although we might actually not go that long, just gives us some headroom, so Shift and left arrow

to take it to the start i'm going to select the camera which since we've disabled the viewport

overlays is going to be easier to achieve in the actual outliner there, then i'm going to click on

this record auto keyframes then any movements that we make to our camera are going to get recorded

in here, so i'm going to press Space and then i'm going to press Shift and that accent grave next to

the one key so let's see how this looks so here you can see it's a little bit shaky looking, i'm

just going to come in front of the camera there like this and then we can take a look from here

and we can see all the keyframes being recorded at the bottom of the screen and then let's zoom

out a little bit and go back towards the end there and i think that's looking pretty good

so i'm going to press stop, so we got up to about frame 430, so i'm going to set our end keyframe to

430 and then Shift left click to the start of the animation and let's play that and see what we get

i don't know about you but i think that's some good sense of speed going on there, after a couple

of off-screen attempts at various camera controls i came up with this, shortened down the timeline a

bit and then just tried deleting a few frames here and there stretching out other parts a little bit

if we were to use Cycles we'd get much more realistic reflections to match the

speed lines, but i think this quick and dirty approach is actually surprisingly effective

so i hope you have fun hurtling things down super fast tunnels :)

if you do please feel free to share them with us on the socials. alright, stay safe and buckle up!