Car animatio: path follow and whell turn

[waffles]

Hey im trying to find a program that will let me make a car model, then have it follow a path with the wheels rotating and have the wheels turn to follow the direction of the path. does XSI let you do this? im having a hard time doing it in 3ds max 6 and i might try Maya too.

[richard-sher]

I know that XSI can do this with a path animation and a rotation script, and I suspect that both 3dsMax and Maya can as well.

[waffles]

well i am having a hard time doing it in 3dsmax, maybe cuz i dont know scripts at all. does ne oen know of a good site or sites that would help me learn scripts?
thnx
seth

[dwigfor]

take a look at www.3dtutorial.com They have a dvd for creating a car rig. Looks great!

[bendingiscool]

I don't have expirience animating, but i think it can be done with all three programs (maya, max, xsi) with simple path animation (maybe a little curve animation); but without scripting.

Take a look Maya Help (when in Maya press F1 and HELP HTML page will pop up). At the left side somewhere u have got animation, and inside that u have path animation. Take look at that. I think it will be useful. Good Luck. I hope i helped u .

[ruddy]

This should work for any package that lets you animate along a path.

The wheels are in a group in a group in the car group. The inner and outer wheel groups are center at the center of their respective wheels. The car group is centered at the intersection of the lines between the corners formed by the wheel centers. The car follows the path. The outer wheel groups are constrained to be tangent to the path. The inner wheel groups rotate: 360 x (path distance / (wheel diameter x pi))

If you make the graphs of the curves of the car path and the wheel groups' rotation the same shape, they will work together pretty well.