In March 2018 I found a DMC-12 Delorean car model online and took it to Blender to check it out. What came from that evening is an ongoing attempt to make a Back to the Future time machine I could integrate into Unreal4 to make some sort of simulator... flight simulator.
Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies and definitely my favorite movie trilogy of all times. But to be honest, when I watched it as a kid the most amazing scene was the ending, where Doc Brown arrives in a 2015 strident attire, chucks garbage into Mr. Fusion and confidently informs Marty that there's no need for roads in the future.
As good as a movie and overall achievement in film history Back to the Future Part 1 is, my best BTTF was Back to the Future Part 2. I could watch that first part of Doc trying not to crash a taxi cab and them landing on an alley in the middle of the rain all day long. The flying Delorean was the epitome of a car to me. It looked cool, it was fast and futuristic with its awesome gull wing doors, and it freakin' could fly.
The best angle from where we should be looking at cars in my opinion
BUT THERE ARE TONS OF 3D MODELS OF THE FLYING DELOREAN ALREADY, you probably reply.
True, but there's something I'm bugged about whenever I see them. See, in the film the flying Delorean was a miniature, and there was also a hydraulic powered fiber-glass version used for the landing sequence in 2015 Hill Valley. Then they used movie magic to switch those with the normal totally not flying steerable DMC-12. It looked credible, but how would it have worked if it was real? How do you get those wheels to function as a normal car, suspension and all, and then simply rotate when it flies?
So, those wheels. Yeah, the wheels dilemma was what prompted me into making my own Flying Delorean.
Call me nosy but I don't like it when they just rotate the wheels from a hinge, like a door and call it a day. First, the wheels end up a lot lower than they looked in the miniatures used in the film (at about the level of the car floor) which doesn't look good. Second, exactly how would the wheels function in car mode? Third, have you ever seen the chassis of the DMC-12?
Yeah, good luck tucking all that in.
But let's backtrack a little bit first. Before I ever knew about how the chassis looked, I just thought that the problem with the 3d flying Deloreans out there was that the wheels were connected to the car to move, that is, the transmission. So you necessarily had to disconnect the transmission from the wheels to get the wheels to rotate down. So my first task was to get that idea in Blender.
Three major problems with this approach. First, the front wheels don't have a transmission, only the back wheels, so this system would only make sense for the back wheels. Second, the front wheels also have to steer. Third issue was the suspension rig in the DMC-12 actual car. How would that work? So I set to find a chassis online and try it out.
The front wheels are a pain to look at. The suspension area is tight, thick and big.
This second attempt proved two new things: The DMC-12 Delorean is probably the worst car to attempt a 2015 hover conversion to. And it's so tight that to get the wheels to the right height (like the miniature models in the film) when they rotate, you have to move parts of the actual chassis out of the way. So things have to shift and pull in to make way for the wheels to rotate comfortably.
Third WIP was when I realized I probably took this too far.
In order to get everything in the right place so many things had to move and rotate position that I started thinking this was too complicated. So one day I was looking around actual miniature models of the Back to the Future time machine, and someone had made a hover conversion for the Eaglemoss Collections model. it had a simple rotation pivot on the wheel which separated the disc from the chassis, and that was it. I thought that was brilliant!
Then again, the wheels ended up a bit lower under the car when in hover mode than I wanted. So armed with those mechanics and what I had tweaked on the actual chassis, I made a working hover conversion that would also allow the wheels to steer and the suspension to work.
With that out of the way, I immersed into making the rest of the car, the interior, exterior cables, tubes and disipators, the high resolution version to make a normal map out of, the little things like the dashboard compass, pedals, rubber straps and even the "A" label which was put by the filming crew on the Hero model "A" Delorean, which was used for most of the exterior shots in the films, cautiously restored by a special team as seen in the documentary "Outatime"
And so, after about 6 months of working on this project at 5 am every morning, I finally exported it from Blender to Unreal, to get it ready for it to become a playable car, that can steer and accelerate like the movie car, but then can also hover and fly like the 2015 one in BTTF2. I also added a few things to see some serious shit when it reaches 88mph.
