Written By Gareth Knight – Creative Director
Like most kids of the early 90’s I had many posters, it was mainly cars, A Ferrari F40, Lamborghini Countach or Porsche 911. Then one day after watching Tomorrows World I applied for a poster that was basically an Infographic of Thrust SSC, the Jet Powered car that a plucky, brilliant or mad British team thought could go Supersonic. When the poster arrived I still remember opening it up from a thick cardboard tube, this was all new to me, posters from Athena or HMV were just wrapped in plastic film, but when I got it out and stuck it to the wall with an overkill amount of blu-tac, I was hooked, Cars didn’t look like Thrust SSC, Land speed record cars didn’t look like SSC.
The next time I would see Thrust SSC on Tomorrows World, would be in 1997 when the team and the car did what they set out to do, go faster than the speed of sound.
Fast forward almost 30 years and I went to show my oldest daughter some footage of Thrust SSC on Youtube, “Why does it look like that?” She asked, referring to the nostalgic resolution of PAL TV.
And that’s pretty much how this started.
Research
The main research involved watching anything I could find regarding thrust, Thankfully there is a fairly good version of an old BBC documentary called Thrust SSC – The mission, as well as videos of runs from inside and the tail, thankfully all on YouTube.
I ended up using some shots from “The Mission” doc for the looking back and end sequence, I think that’s fine under fair use 😉 – That was different research.
Having a background in Naval Simulators, I did know that distance was going to be against me.
Thrust SSC’s full run was around 18km/11miles, this would push any engine or 3d application, let alone trying to simulate smoke volumes of that size, even just moving around the scene would be an issue.
I had to do some research into film miniatures, so everything within the final Unreal scene is 10% of the real world scale, even then it means the full run is 1800 meters, which was still problematic for simulating volumes.
Storyboard and Music
To storyboard what I wanted to achieve I wanted to edit everything to a piece of music that I think I had saved a long time ago, it always stood out to me, little did I know it was created for another short film, “The Racer”, but I was way too far down the rabbit hole to change after finding this out.
For the storyboard I used footage from the above mentioned videos, I cut them together to create something that was way too long for what was manageable given the time I had set aside.
But with a couple of iterations and some questionable sound editing by myself (Spoiler, a professional did a sound cut for me) I got it to around the magic 2 minute mark.
Modelling
I had been working on a procedural modular asset project before I started on Thrust, so to sink my teeth into something that had to be pushed and pulled around within 3DS Max was something to relish. I used lowpoly form with OpenSubdiv to achieve the correct shape of SSC. I find this approach really helps with clean topology and a good way to manage UV unwrapping headaches.
The SSC Shape, relatively straight forward to create with a lot of clean lines and the help of lots excellent reference from the Thrust SSC website.
Animation and Simulation
3DS Max was used for the engine animations, the cockpit and steering wheel were “rigged” (Parented correctly with lots of dummy objects) to stop any gimbal lock issues. The actual car route animation was done using a solver within Houdini, I keyed specific speed points along the route by animating them to the footage of the speedo, that gave me what I thought to be the best method, as information on speed and acceleration are quite sparse online and they also don’t seem to match up with the real footage from within the cockpit.
Unreal Engine
My first task in Unreal Engine was to tackle the terrain. I used LiDAR heightmap data from the USGS of the Black Rock Desert and imported it into Gaea. The final terrain ended up more simplified than I originally intended, but since it wasn’t the main focus of the project, spending more time refining it would have resulted in diminishing returns for something most people likely wouldn’t notice.
The SSC afterburners flame and heat shimmer were created using Niagara and custom materials, these were then converted into a blueprint that was controlled using 1 slider for intensity to be used within Sequencer.
This project was also my first time working with MetaHuman inside Unreal Engine. I was really impressed with how intuitive and accessible the workflow was, especially when it came to quickly creating believable digital characters and integrating them into the scene. Although the animation requirements for this project were relatively simple, MetaHuman made the entire process feel streamlined and efficient, while still achieving a high-quality result.
What’s Next
For a potential V2 of the project, I would like to further develop the environment to better capture the atmosphere and identity of the location. Adding supporting elements such as team vehicles, equipment, and surrounding details would help create a stronger sense of scale, achievement, and authenticity around the SSC Thrust project.
I also think the project could translate well into a VR experience. Recreating the sensation of speed and scale in virtual reality would present an interesting technical and artistic challenge, particularly in balancing immersion, motion, and environmental feedback to convey the intensity of the vehicle in motion.