3D Funny Car Caricatures

Funny Car Cartoons

Big Deal is just one of many cartoonist working with automotive cartoons. The general look is big tires and engines, and wrongly spelt, well known brand names. 

The Funny Car, a particular class in Drag Racing, shown here is the feel I went after. Australia currently has a booming Top Alcohol class, and we have based the shape on a recent local car, a 2000 Ford Mustang bodied 3000hp monster.

When I get high I get high on speed
Top fuel funny car's a drug for me
- Kickstart My Heart, Motley Crue

Popping the Chute

The 3D models were built with splines in Hash's Animation Master. This software allows all the squash and stretch of traditional cartoon animation. We can make the car stand up on its tires when doing a burnout, and bounce through the ET speed trap. The models were then placed in a scene and rendered using the cartoon shader, to simulate the look of cell animation. Flat areas of colour and outlines in black, a lot like my car caricatures. There are lots of parameters that can be adjusted to give variations of the look. This image had a fixed black outline of 2 pixels for each object used in the render.

The Burnout

There are various ways to do smoke and fire, and we have gone for the none Particle System approach. The tire smoke is several groups of spheres of different shapes and sizes that move through each other, and are rendered in stark white. Not only does it look like a cartoon, it also renders instantly, unlike particle systems.

Here is a highly compressed, 2 second animation in Quicktime and AVI formats with sound, demo of the smoke look we are using.
burnout.mov (215x170 pixel Quicktime 195 Kbytes).
burnout.wmv (208x160 pixel 104Kbytes).

Wheel Bounce

This last image has reflections turned on for comparision, to make it look shinny. Top Alcohol cars don't generate the 6 foot exhaust flames of Top Fuel, so we don't have to simulate them here.

These are for a Drag Racing Game we are working on. Reaction time, Dutch Courage, burnouts, explosions, wheelie bounce, luck and roaring bizzar humor?

Check the Modelling and Simulation page......

Any comments?