Forum - Craft Animations - 3d animation tools

Hello,

I am doing a scene with a large amount of cars in it. The rigs all seem to work properly however when I am ready to record the animation it often locks up. I have tried breaking up the scene into smaller segments with varied results. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. I was wondering if anybody had any tips for handling a large amount of cars in the scene.

ngoreham wrote:Hello,

I am doing a scene with a large amount of cars in it. The rigs all seem to work properly however when I am ready to record the animation it often locks up. I have tried breaking up the scene into smaller segments with varied results. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. I was wondering if anybody had any tips for handling a large amount of cars in the scene.

Hello ngoreham,

Have you tried animating a few of the cars at a time? Say that you have 50 cars, try recording only 5 at the time, in 10 takes. If you have the cars running in Autonomous Mode you can use Resimulate to "automize" the process.

Yes, that is the best way I have found so far. It seems like about 5 cars at a time is the most you want to do at one time. With 100 cars or so though it gets tedious, and I was wondering if there was an easier method or perhaps I was setting it up wrong. Thanks for your help.

ngoreham wrote:Yes, that is the best way I have found so far. It seems like about 5 cars at a time is the most you want to do at one time. With 100 cars or so though it gets tedious, and I was wondering if there was an easier method or perhaps I was setting it up wrong. Thanks for your help.

Aren't you able to Resimulate all 100 cars at once? Recording them all at once I can see might be hard but Resimulate should be OK.

hmm, I thought I needed to record first, then if I made changes to the settings I could resimulate. What would be the difference between the two buttons? Is the record button just for recording the live inputs, when you take control of the rig?

ngoreham wrote:hmm, I thought I needed to record first, then if I made changes to the settings I could resimulate. What would be the difference between the two buttons? Is the record button just for recording the live inputs, when you take control of the rig?

Correct. Record is for recording new input data. Resimulate is normally for recreating the animation using the existing input data and current configuration settings but it can also be used to create animation data if the tools aren't input-driven. So as you're probably not using any input data in combination with running 4-Wheeler Extended in autonomous mode you can just press Resimulate right away.

That does seem to work better. It still doesn't want to simulate too many at one time. It tends to vary on the amount it wants to simulate. Sometimes it will do 30 at a time, sometimes it has trouble doing 1.

I was also noticing in a couple of my scenes it would have problems when I had a subdivision modifier on my ground object, such as a Turbosmooth or a Subdivide in Max. When I collapsed them into Editable Poly it worked fine. Strange

ngoreham wrote:I was also noticing in a couple of my scenes it would have problems when I had a subdivision modifier on my ground object, such as a Turbosmooth or a Subdivide in Max. When I collapsed them into Editable Poly it worked fine. Strange

In order for Craft Director Studio's tools to be able to interact with any ground objects, we convert the object "behind the scenes" into a surface that we're able to read from and get the same results every time. This is most likely the cause of why you run into problem when you've add in stuff like modifiers.

I'll see if we can do anything about reading "through" modifiers.

I was trying to add in some of the steering noise and was wondering if there is a way to adjust the frequency of the noise so it looks less jerky.

ngoreham wrote:I was trying to add in some of the steering noise and was wondering if there is a way to adjust the frequency of the noise so it looks less jerky.

Are you using the latest version? Because we updated the Autonomous Mode recently (I believe the update was included in version 9.3.1 or 9.4.1) to work a lot better. It removed a lot of the jerkyness.

we are using 9.4.1. I was trying to make more of a random sway. It seems like the steering noise just adjusts the amount.