Andrey Lebrov's AUTOMOTIVE CG CHALLENGE Entry - Gothic/Victorian Car Animation WITH full CG Breakdow

This is my entry for Andrey Lebrov's latest CG challenge where we had to model and animate a car.

Let me start by saying that this was my first try at making a realistic looking car and highly detailed buildings. Normally my artstyle is very cartoonish so I wanted to try something new, and this was it!
I went for a gothic/victorian style but was intrigued to try something from my imagination rather than copying movies etc.

Render time: 130+ hours
Softwares used: Cinema 4D & Redshift, After Effects
(Zbrush, Substance Painter and Marvelous Designer were also used but very sparingly)

I should mention that I made every asset myself (read below for more detailed description) and only had 3 weeks to do so, in which too I had technical issues (long power cuts every other day in my area due to bad weather) so I couldn't do everything I wanted to do with this project and may have to sacrifice the rendering quality in a couple of shots. Still managed to render it at 4K though, just enough to submit it on the last day.

These two to three weeks included the modelling and texturing of each one of these highly detailed assets from scratch. I also made some of the textures myself as well (Textures, not just materials). And ofcourse the rigging of characters, animation, rendering and compositing.

I also recorded the music myself (the one that plays during the animation, not breakdown), and the rain sound effects (why not take the advantage of bad weather?). The car sounds were recorded through a videogame.

See, my goal for this animation was to take my skills to the next level, which is why I wanted to do as much as I can all by myself. So I've barely used anything downloaded from the internet. The only assets downloaded from the internet were the two cars parked in front of the main building and some of the buildings in the very last shot (which I again, grabbed from a videogame) as there was simply not enough time left to model them.

I learnt ALOT during this project. mainly about how to model huge buildings with lots of detail, animated rain textures, and optimizations. Talking about which, I had spent so much time making every little thing from scratch, and adding every little detail I could (just for my own learning purposes) that I had quite less time left for rendering. I also learnt alot about topology while modelling the car.

Anyway, enough ranting for today, I'm submitting this literally one or two hours from the deadline (in my timezone, according to UK there's still 7-8 hours left). Please watch with headsets and in dark for best experience.

Once again here's my info:

Name: Saksham Thukral
Country: India
Age: just turned 18 last month
Experience in animation: 3-4 years
Softwares used: Cinema 4D & Redshift, After Effects

Social media links:
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/sakshamthukral
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artwizardsam