008Selected project

Why is a Croc drifting?

I don’t know. I just thought it would be fun to find out whether I could make one.

Role: All of it
Year: 2024
Context: Personal experiment
Disciplines: 3D modelling, Animation, Smoke simulation, Weight painting

A black Croc with a small red heart charm, lit dramatically against white

It turned into a small motion study, and a way into three tools I had been meaning to learn properly: animation, smoke simulation and weight painting.

The Croc model untextured, in white — Untextured, finished, and the rig underneath it

The finished black Croc with a small red heart charm — Untextured, finished, and the rig underneath it

The modelling was the easy half. A plain black Croc, like mine, with a few small details so it had some personality: the strap, the holes, and one red heart charm, which ended up being the only colour in the whole thing.

Then came the smoke. Lots of iterations, lots of adjustments, and a fair amount of confusion before the movement did what I wanted. Smoke is unforgiving: either it sells the speed, or the whole thing looks like a shoe standing still in fog.

An early smoke simulation, the Croc almost buried in it — Too much of it, and a version where you can still see the shoe

The smoke simulation running over the model’s wireframe in the viewport — Too much of it, and a version where you can still see the shoe

Then weight painting, which is how you tell a model which parts of itself should follow a movement, and how much. Confusing at the start, obvious a few attempts in. For a soft rubber shoe throwing itself sideways, that is the entire performance.

And because a drift should leave a mark, I finished with a top view of the scene, where the tracks on the ground spell something out.

Top view: the tyre marks left by the drift spell out the word crocs — Worth every extra iteration

Frame from the animation: the Croc entering the turn — Five frames out of forty-five seconds

Frame from the animation: smoke arcing behind the Croc — Five frames out of forty-five seconds

A small, silly project that was almost certainly more work than it needed to be. I would do it again.

Forty-five seconds of it