Car: Aston Martin DB9.
I recommend watching in high quality.
Everything you see in this video is made by me, except for the ragdoll (the guy sitting in the car), because I didn’t feel to... I did however think about putting a helmet on him, but I think he would have got serious brain injuries anyway...
The car has been developed throughout the making of this film. That is the reason for example why, in some clips, the windscreen breaks and in other clips it doesn’t. It’s also the reason why some parts brake too easy sometimes.
The following might be considered gibberish, and you might therefore not want to read it.
This car has been modeled in Rhinoceros. It was then exported to 3d studio, where it was textured and then made “simulatable“. It was then simulated with reactor, which is a plug-in in 3d studio.
There are some 2100 parts in this car. There is an entirely different simulation-model behind the movement of this car. The simulation-model is invisible, and the visible model of the car is then linked to the simulation-model. The simulation-model is made up of 420 parts and 640 constraints, constraining the parts to each other.
To make a crash scene the car was then given an initial speed, and some obstacles were placed in its way. After this to scene was simulated, a process which took about 20sec / frame. This video has a frame rate of 30 frames / sec, so that means a 3-4 second long clip took about 40 minutes to simulate. The simulation is done by the computer and you cant influence it while it’s being done.
Finally all clips are rendered. 30 frames / sec gives a total of 5400 pictures that had to be rendered for this video. Rendering means “calculating“ how each frame looks like. The computer does the calculating all by itself, so no one has painted each 5400 pictures in Photoshop or anything like that. The average rendering time per frame was about 10 minutes. That’s a total of 54 000 minutes = about 40 days. The computer gets quite slow when rendering, so I usually put on the rendering process when I was going somewhere.
Part of the reason for the long rendering times was that this video was originally rendered in 1080p aka full HD (1920 x 1080), some clips, though, were rendered in 720p (1280 x 720). The longest rendering time for a single frame was over 6 hrs.