This dilapidated-looking roller coaster is another sort of ongoing project of mine. I originally modeled this scene in 2013 for an animation contest. The project suffered the same fate as a lot of my material from my vocational school days. A lot of assets had to be re-located, and some things apparently never made it off the classroom computer. In this case, however, I was able to find the majority of the files, and am in the process of restoring the model.
I believe that these first few images were taken as test renders prior rendering out the final animation. The image quality issues are mostly due to certain compromises that had to be made to get the project rendered in a timely manner on the hardware that was available to us. Three PCs does not a render farm make! Wanting to be able to take some high-quality beauty shots was my biggest motivation for picking this project back up.
This was probably my favorite shot of the bunch. I really like how the train turned out. Real pain getting it to stick to the tracks properly though.
The castle exterior was always a bit rough around the edges. In the animation itself, you only really got a quick look at it from the speeding train, so it wasn't a particularly high priority.
The ride entrance. The goal for the original project was to create a scary roller coaster. My argument, which ended up winning out rather easily, was that the most terrifying roller you could possibly ride was one that looked ready to fall apart at any moment. You could probably get tetanus just from looking at this thing! There was supposed to be a sidewalk from the gate, but the grass seems to be covering it up.
This is the first render I took upon revisiting the project. The paths to the required texture files were long broken, and needed to be redone. Oddly, it seems that only the pre-final version of the model got saved. If you'll take a look at the ride entrance, you can see that the gateway from the above still is missing. It seems that the grass was also missing in this version of the scene; we had to get rid of it to speed up render time, in any case.
The same shot as above, after most of the missing textures were re-located. As a side note, the track itself was built using a set of prefab sections that I created for the project. All things considered, they managed to snap together quite nicely. It was probably what let me get a design this large ready by the deadline, something that was of no small importance given that the other team members on the project were a 2D concept artist and video editor. Long story short, I pretty much ended up carrying the lion's share on this one.
This rider POV was used for much of the original animation. The lift hill out in front is conspicuously lacking a lift chain; the project ran long and I never had time to implement it.
