Animate car

# 1 22-10-2007 , 06:14 AM

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Hi guys. Anyone know the best way to animate a car so that you can control its acceleration and direction from steering-like controls. It's a rigid body object that has to be influenced by collisions and gravity. I dont think an animation path is what i want to do. Maybe something to regulate impulse? Thanks for the help.

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# 2 22-10-2007 , 04:58 PM

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Car nimation

To achieve something like that you would have to most likely write and expression to achieve what you want. Especially something as intricate as you explained.

Here is a link tutorial where you can get an idea of how to use expressions and apply it in you animations. https://www.talino.org/tutorials/exp1/

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Last edited by djknucklez1; 22-10-2007 at 05:11 PM.

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# 3 22-10-2007 , 07:56 PM

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Thanks for the info Djknucklez1, but I'm looking for something more like rigid body dynamics. Although thats an interesting link, I dont see the relationship between that and a car driving. I need something to take the car off-road with. Good controls and the idea that if the tires arent on the ground, the vehicle shouldnt move foreward. as a matter of fact, something to help my vehicle only move in the object x direction and not the world x direction would be useful as well.

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# 4 22-10-2007 , 07:58 PM

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I think its rather odd that no one has figured out how to do this yet. or at least no one posted it. Its all over the place, ie. the movie cars, ca commercials, demo reels. How do they get those cars to move like that? its got to be rigid bodies for the collisions but how do the control them so well?

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# 5 22-10-2007 , 10:34 PM

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People arnt replying because people don't use rigid body dynamics to do cars in they way you describe. Most people would use keyframe animation and use expressions to drive the wheel spin and extra controllers for wheel orientation.

Steering and 'acceleration' controls implies that you want to change the velocity as maya is playing through the time line?

And in adverts its all animated by hand unless the car is out of control, then they would use something like blast code or maybe rigid bodies to get results if it is something complicated, but even then they would bake the animation as keyframes so they can tweak the animation to perfection.

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# 6 23-10-2007 , 11:01 AM

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Originally posted by LauriePriest
People arnt replying because people don't use rigid body dynamics to do cars in they way you describe. Most people would use keyframe animation and use expressions to drive the wheel spin and extra controllers for wheel orientation.

Originally Posted by

naw i've seen it... I too wanna know how to rig a car.

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# 7 23-10-2007 , 12:57 PM

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Originally posted by starjsjswars
naw i've seen it... I too wanna know how to rig a car.

Originally Posted by

It's nonsecenes to think that people arent doing this. It's in every car commercial, and some movies. I figured it out btw, but it's not ready yet. I'm gonna need to make a mel script to control the car direction while still using collision of rigid body objects. This will prove to give much more realistic reactions to driving surfaces, inertia and momentum than just key frame animation. The script will also need to govern impulse, I dont want to have forward acceleration when it flips upside down.

Don't worry bud, SimplyMaya.com is my home. This will be the first place i post the script and tutorial, I promise.

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# 8 24-10-2007 , 03:46 PM

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sweet thanks man.

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# 9 25-10-2007 , 09:00 AM

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it will look crap, for sure. They keyframe in commercials for sure! user added image

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# 10 25-10-2007 , 10:08 AM

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With dynamics you could always use the impulse to get it going an then adjust this via keyframing it, then bake the animation down to add the secondaty animation for the suspension, although you could use a hair system to add this where the wheels are attached to the folicle and the body to the curve, this way if it goes in a direction the car leans back under acceleration and left/right and then forward in braking.

Think to start it all off I would use a motion path over dynamics, with a basic model thats attaced as a wrap to a more complex model using the hair system, its probably going to be more complex as you might need to have some joints attached to the wheels to control the rotations via a SDK and an attribute (like you would when doing a reverse foot lock) and you would have to key the steering as the car goes along the path, probably same with the rotations of the wheels but thats probaly going to eoither be really simple that I cant think of or pretty complex, maube use the U value on the curve to drive the rotations via MEL????

The above is a bit of a brain dump so hopefully it might be useful, but I reckon it can be done, although Lauire's right you'll probably want to bake it all then adjust it using ol'fashioned key moving in the graph eidtor otherwise you could be there for years getting it sorted!!

edit - I nfact ncloth might just do something like this pretty well off the bat.

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