Forum - Craft Animations - 3d animation tools

Also, if the vehicle is moving at high speeds you'll need to increase the number of subframes to be able to deal with the rapid changes of terrain beneath the vehicle

Firepower in both xsi 7.5 and 2010 seems to be broken. The barrel will recoil and new bullets will be generated but they only receive a single key on the frame they were born and then remain inside the barrel.

Simulating the tracks after the vehicle can also help starting issues since you can create the track after the wheels and vehicle has become cozy with the ground and you avoid it bouncing down in phases on the first frame of animation.

So the boogies from CrawlerTracks should be the same size as the high-poly boogie wheel so that there is a gap between the ground and the boogie so that the threads stay above ground. However we know that there is a problem with the Crawler Extended that makes the ground cut trough the wheels if it...

Using constraints instead of parenting works really well for this method since it keeps the craft hierarchy and hirez hierarchy's separate. You can then parent both the hierarchy's under a new group/object (I like using a cube made of curves the size of the vehicle). Things like targetDirectionMesh'...

On Luigi's YouTube vid on the firepower he said that you're changing the collision mesh. Any hints on what will happen with it? With the current version I've noticed some problems with it: 1) My shell ejection firepower's bullets jump like 20 feet straight up when they collide with the ground mesh, ...

How is the muzzle velocity for a firepower calculated in relation to the firepower's scale? For example, I've got a robot that has a M240, Machine Gun, 7.62mm that has should have a muzzle velocity of 905 m/s (2,970 ft/s) with a rate of fire of 650–950 rounds/min (about 12 rounds/sec). Due to the pr...

Another option for the axle is to use a cdt suspension thingy linked to the wheel center meshes and have the axle parented to the middle of the suspension. If the extra wheels don't tilt properly by linking them to the wheel center meshes you could link them to the ends of the suspension

http://c2istudios.com:8001/Public/images/cdt_Stryker.jpg The most reliable way I've found is to use a 4 wheeler with the wheels matched to the outer stryker wheels. For the inner wheels I use extra wheels with "Fixate Wheel" set to on for the rear one and off for the front one. I've tried using fix...

To do it with a State Machine (left) you would need states at each corner of the "Z", you would also need 10 buttons assigned and would need to press them in the right order at the appropriate timing. An alternative would be to use a spline speed controller (right) with "gyro mode only" checked on a...

You could use either a direct input or an observer cam then parent/link the zoom and focus cam under it so it inherits it's motion. Both can be recorded at the same time.

Only thing I can think of would be to build a new rig ontop of, and bound to, your existing trailer rig. To get the most control I'd make a dummy object (in max) or a locator (in maya) then position and orient it to your existing TowingHookMeshTransform, then parent/link it so it's a child of your c...

Wildcards usually work except for namespaces. There's supposed to be an arguement in the "ls" command to have it ignore namespaces but it doesn't work very well. Solution is to multiple searches like "*:*_GravityDirectionMesh" plus "*:*:*_GravityDirectionMesh" plus "*:*:*:*_GravityDirectionMesh" etc...

couldn't the selections filters that you speak for be done by using the objects' names instead? I mean all GravityDirectionMeshes are called %somethingsomething% _GravityDirectionMesh . Yeah that's how we currently do it. Having an extra selection filter method would be nice in case things get rena...

Yeah, simular to how my little script works, but maybe in a different order. Feel free to use any or part of my script in your enhancement. Ideally, when a new cdt element is created (or added to in the case of adding wheels/tracks to the track system) something would run a check to see if a materia...

Clean/Organize CDT Materials in Maya Here's a script I wrote a little while ago to help deal with the millions of lamberts that Craft Director makes (well maybe not millions... but I have seen them go into the multiple hundreds on complex scenes). This should grab most cdt lamberts, if I missed any...

this is the only feasible method for the presets to work with all different kinds of scales, because for example many animators work in cm but use 1 cm as 1 meter (due to dynamics etc which work in cm by default). The 3D industry is not very standardized when it comes to units and true scale. That ...

One thing i've found to fix that is to compare the spline speed controller and the vehicle's scales then put values for their speed settings based on ratios for that. So a vehicle half the size of the spline speed needs to go twice as fast to keep up with it.

While making a recent animation for Liquid Robotics' WaveGlider robot I found Maya oceans to give the nicest results right out of the box. Unfortunatly the way they work is by displacing a (otherwise perfectly flat) nurbs plane at render time. Maya has a built in bouy/boat system that well... is rat...

Out of curiosity, why does CDT create new vehicles so that their "front" is facing down the negative Z axis in maya? I know other things, like directional lights, also face down neg Z, but I thought it would be more practicle to be able to switch to the front viewport and be looking at the front of ...