3ds Max Animating a Car Path - Part 01 - Introduction

hello everyone this is americine from autodesk with a new tutorial that you will hopefully find useful and enjoyable this tutorial is in a way of follow-up to the last one i posted in the last tutorial you learned how to bring two autodesk products together autodesk revit and 3ds max design the series was long and among many features you learn to animate cars by constraining them to paths although that process was relatively easy a subscriber on this channel shrewdly remarked that the car's wheels weren't spinning that's a perfectly valid observation and in this tutorial you learn not only to fix that problem but a few other goodies as well in effect what you will be learning in this tutorial is to actually rig a car so that it does much more than just travel on a path apart from spinning wheels you'll also learn to turn the wheels and roll the car body with every turn the car makes as always you start by exploring the scene you will be working on and do some preliminary setup work instead of using the same city block scene you have used before you will work on a simpler scene this time around it will make the viewports easier to navigate and enables you to focus on the issue at hand open the scene named car rig start dot max you downloaded for this tutorial the scene is simple and has visible objects including a garage floor a few walls an old style car and a path keep in mind that what you learn here can certainly be adapted to larger scenes as well zoom in on the car you may also want to hide the walls in order to see the car better the car is in fact made of multiple components and that's important in order to be able to create relationships between parts there's a car body that seems to be the head of a hierarchy as displayed in the scene explorer there are multiple objects acting as children to the car's body including the four wheels steering wheel and a couple of cameras hidden from view at this time the idea here is you want to do more than just constraining the car to a path you want to make sure the wheels spin by the proper amount in relation to path travel and speed you also might want to turn the wheels according to left and right turns the path might take better yet you could consider establishing a relationship between the front wheels and the steering wheel so that the front wheels turn as you rotate and animate the steering wheel you could take it one step further and set the car's body roll to react to the steering wheel turning as well this is hardly felt with mounted cars but it's certainly pronounced on 67 chevy since you are considering all these relationships and objects reacting to one another there are a couple of basic steps to take first you are going to need a few animation helpers these are very helpful when dealing with wiring and expressions they provide you with an extra layer of control to ensure animation behaves the way you intend intended here you'll need at least three animation helpers one for the body of the car and two more for each of the front wheels start with the car body helper create a point helper in box mode make it big enough in relation to the car so you can see it and select it easier align the helper to the car pivot to pivot in position and rotation in all three axes name the new helper car main help at this point is still an independent object from the car's hierarchy but it's meant to be the topmost parent to link the car body to the new helper you can use the link tool in click and drag mode if you are using 3ds max 2015 or newer you can also use the scene explorer again using a simple click and drag as the helper eventually travels on the path the rest of the hierarchy follows you still get control over the individual components for example the car's body can roll independently of its helper parent this presents us with the problem of the wheels as the body rolls the wheels should still be making contact with the ground that's another benefit of the main helper instead of the four wheels being linked to the car body link them instead to the main helper this way they would still travel with the rest of the hierarchy but they remain grounded as the car body eventually rolls in fact and since we're discussing the car wheels the front wheels need an additional layer of control they need animation helpers as well because they are expected to rotate in various ways they are expected to spin on their local z-axis but to turn on their local y-axis the problem is as the wheels spin the local y-axis changes to prevent this problem from happening you need to add an animation helper that doesn't spin and that can't control the turning of the wheel as the car steers left or right create a new animation helper and make its size proportionate to the front wheel align it to the left front wheel in position only on all three axes name it car help fl fl for front left link it to the main helper and then link the front left wheel to it doing it this way now you can spin the wheel itself while your control is turning by animating the helper repeat on the other side naming the helper car help fr fr for front right make the necessary links as you did a few moments ago you're almost done with the setup work you still need a very important step though whenever you're dealing with wiring and expressions and fairly complex rig relationships it is important to use list controllers by default each object in 3ds max has a single animation controller for keyframed animation in this case every single object has one animation controller for position and one for rotation typically a position xyz and euler xyz controllers when dealing with hierarchies wiring and expressions child objects work in the space of their parents this can be confusing especially if the various objects are not oriented the same way you can see a good example of this by enabling effect pivot only mode in the hierarchy panel note the local orientation of the front wheel in relation to its parent the helper you just created visually the wheel is supposed to rotate on its z-axis but its parent suggests otherwise the y-axis to prevent this kind of confusion and problems you use list controllers practically you freeze the transforms in their current state and this resets them to work locally this has been discussed in other tutorials on this channel the process is simple you select one or more objects in this case all objects that make the cars hierarchy including the helpers and then you hold alt and right click to access the animation quad menu there you click on freeze transforms you get a little prompt with a small description click yes to proceed selecting any object in the hierarchy and going to the motion panel you can see that position and rotation tracks are now layered you can add more tracks using the available channel what's more if you select an object and move it around and rotate it you can reset the changes by holding alt and right clicking and using the option transform to zero your setup work is now complete save your file in the next movie you start animating the car you

Channel: Autodesk 3ds Max Learning Channel

Views: 110,396

Keywords: Autodesk, 3d, 3ds max, 3ds max design, adskbhsverall, amer yassine, global illumination, rigging, path constraint, 3d animation, car animation, 3ds max learn, 3ds max tutorial, 3ds max and revit

Id: eYu4WlGHtto

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 15 2014