Mine Cart Experiment

I have a couple of ideas for my project that gives me the task of creating a animation for the speech "More Than a Pill" by the NHS. Both ideas I have involve a mine cart: the first idea uses the mine cart as the main object that travels through time while around it the term "wellbeing" evolves from medication and physical health to a more focus around mental health and people co-operating with each other, eventually the mine cart becomes a more modern use of transportation. My second idea is to use the mine cart for a small part of the animation that mentions how people need to work together, where the mine cart picks people up as it passes them. Another Idea I have decided to stick with is to use the mine cart as a simple reason to move the camera through my scene. I feel my animation will lack content panning the camera across an empty space to get to the next scene so I will use the mine cart that camera can focus on until it reaches the next main scene.

My animation will be in 3D using the software Cinema 4D. I have done research on mine carts looking at images of mine carts in real life and animated mine carts other people have used in their projects.

I used the images as references to come up with my own style and design for a mine cart. After studying the images above I came up with three different ideas and sketches below.

The mine cart represents the incident that happened in Wales between the 1920s and 1944 that signifies what the NHS stand for today. I also wanted it to represent a mine cart adults would have seen in cartoons during their child hood but also entertaining for the younger generation today. Because of this I chose the wood and steel hybrid mine cart as it would be something you find in a wacky children's cartoon and at the same time looks old fashioned.

The next step was to redraw my sketch on a computer so I could use a JPEG reference within Cinema 4D which helps with shaping and sizing the model during the modelling stage.

Now with the final sketch of the front and side view of my mine cart I had the task of applying them to plane objects in Cinema 4D as materials. This would allow me to position the drawings along the correct axis in a 3D environment so I could use them as a reference.

My references were now in place and I could start modelling. I used a cube as the main object for the mine cart and then I used the 4 corners of the face that was underneath the cube to inner extrude a leg for the frame underneath the mine cart.

Next I started to experiment with some materials to apply to my mine cart. The bolts on the frame of the cart I wanted to be a light steel colour but for them to look slightly worn, so I applied a slight reflection to them as then the bolts look scraped and lost their shine. The rest of the mine cart I wanted a darker colour aiming towards iron and again I applied a slight reflection to show it has being worn. The wooden material in the middle I kept changing because I wasn't satisfied with the appearance of the texture but I know I wanted it to be a lighter tone. Inside of the mine cart I used a different tone of wood a darker colour because I wanted to emphasise on the lack of light that the inside wouldn't get.

After I had an idea of what materials I wanted, I made the wheels for my mine cart and lined the focus point with the middle of the objects so when they rotate to roll they stay in one spot.  Finally to finish the model I used multiple spheres and the Boole object to create a bulb that sits in iron casing that acts as the mine carts headlights. The spheres inside the case I applied a yellow material to that makes use of the glow feature so it acts as a light.

My mine cart model is now complete and I wanted to experiment with it moving on a rail road. I created the rail tracks and sat the mine cart at the end before sliding it to the other end of the tracks on the timeline while also rotating each wheel to give it the illusion the wheels were moving the cart.