Methods for car rigging for animation?

[Brodie Geers]

What are my options for car rigging in 3ds Max. At this stage I'm much more concerned with simplicity than accuracy. Something that will turn the wheels and follow the contours would go a long way. I don't really need the cars to bounce around like the shocks are made from a Slinky. Just need them for simple arch-viz animations driving through parking lots and along roads and such.

 

I've seen the Ant Traffic Simulator ( http://www.cgarchitect.com/news/newsfeed.asp?nid=5019 ) but haven't heard much about it from users so I don't know if that's the way to go.

 

I've seen Madcar but it looks like much more than I need from the videos. Plus I wasn't able to install it on 3ds Max 2011 (it may very well be my fault as I'm a novice with 3ds Max and for some reason the plugins and scripts never come with install instructions - I just put the .dlo file in the plugins folder and got an error and gave up).

 

I'd like to avoid as much manual labor as possible but I don't know how reasonable that is. Right now it looks like I'm going to have to refresh myself on linking and controllers and all sorts of stuff I've forgotten about and would rather remain ignorant of if I can help it.

 

So are there other plugins/scripts there I should know about? Are there pre-rigged cars for purchase that would help? Has anyone used the Ant Traffic plugin?

 

-Brodie

[neil poppleton]

Have a look at http://www.craftanimations.com/ I have seen a demo by these guys and very impressive.

[aaronrumple]

We just used Ant for an animation and like it. It is nice that it only scipts out the setup and after that you still have full control with all the standard keyframe and track editing tools. It was easy to set up a few paths and then tweek the starts and positions for the camera in the graph editor.

 

Plus we can use all our existing cars we're built up over the years.

Edited October 20, 2010 by aaronrumple

[Nic H]

Iv been using madcar the last few days and its good for close up detail car stuff/ stopping starting / brake dip / tracking terrain etc but other than that its a bit of a pain tbh.

 

cant wait to try ant traffic for aerial stuff that was previously done with dummies, splines and took alot of work to get intrestions looking believable.