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Toy Car F1 Intro
HTML5 Video and Stuff!
Toy car F1 project update
My next project
How to Build a Car Rig in 3ds Max
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Car Rig Project - 3ds max - Updated
Unreal Tournament 3 - UT3 - City Project
Car Rig Tutorial - 3ds Max and Reactor
Motorway and Foliage - Grass
Mod: UT3 City - Download
Maps and mods - and L4D Server
Motorway - Part 3 (Test Render)
Map: Far Cry 2 - Forts
Demo Video 2009
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Toy Car F1 Intro
HTML5 Video and Stuff!
Toy car F1 project update
My next project
How to Build a Car Rig in 3ds Max
iPhone site
Site refresh
Site update
Demo Video 2009
Earth
Earth - Test 2
Earth - Test 1
New intro sequence - version 1
Motorway
Indestructible Squidgy Thing
Scripted Car Rig
Bullet Impact Effects
Reactor Physics
Bugatti Veyron vs Eurofighter Typhoon
The Lego Matrix
Man vs Machine
Monkey Lift Animation
Angry Monkey
Red Bull Air Race
Careless Kid
Motorway - Part 4 (Test Render 2)
Motorway - Part 3 (Test Render)
Motorway - Part 2 (Vehicles)
Motorway and Foliage - Grass
Silverstone 2009
Black Hawk Model
Mod: UT3 City - Download
Map: Far Cry 2 - Forts
Maps and mods - and L4D Server
Car Rig Tutorial - 3ds Max and Reactor
Creating Dynamic RSS Feeds in PHP
Website Redesigned
Blog Coming Soon
Balls
Skills section added
Car Rig - WRC
Car Rig - F1
Work in progress update 2
Work in progress update 1
Character Animation Loops
Work in progress renders
Unreal Tournament 3 - UT3 - City Project
Low poly character model
Car Rig Project - 3ds max - Updated
I should have updated my site by now but...
Monkey...
Interactive 3D Environment - Kitchen
Interactive 3D Environment - Matrix
Demo Reel
Demo Reel - Animation Specific
Demo Reel - Special Effects
Website Redesign Finished
Work In Progress: The Lego Matrix
Demo Reels Online
New Content Added
Interactive Animation Cycles
Car Rig Project
Blog Type Section Created
DirectX

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Toy Car F1 Intro

Posted in category Finished Animations | 273 views

07/03/2010 @ 13:28

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This is a version of the BBC F1 intro I made in Lego-like bricks.

Click here for a version raw render version without additional effects for comparison.

The actual version can be seen on YouTube. You'll notice I've focussed on the first section of it, despite the second part containing car motion, which I have done a lot of in the past. This is because, well... I've done a lot of this in the past. And the first part is more interesting and better made too.

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HTML5 Video and Stuff!

Posted in category Site News and Updates | 849 views

26/02/2010 @ 18:32

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The video is completely unrelated to this post other than the fact that HTML5 browsers will play it.

I've been playing with the delights of HTML5, and added videos to hopefully replace Flash. Not that I had a problem with Flash, but YouTube/Google are doing it, so that means everyone else has to because they're obviously correct - Google wins at the internet.

But the immediate advantages are the performance and quality, and it just feels nicer that it's embedded better into the page, although it has broken W3C complicances... for now.

The problem is that not all browsers support HTML5 - yes, you again, Internet Explorer. I hate you so much and never miss an opportunity to tell everyone how irritating you are. But even then, the browsers that do support HTML5 don't all support the same filetypes. Webkit (Chrome/Safari) play nice MP4/M4V file types, which means they play well on the iPhone and support an image to display that invites you to click to play.

HTML5 on iPhone

Screenshot of the iPhone version of my site displaying the graphic that predictably leads to the video when tapped.

Firefox has done an IE and done things differently by not supporting MP4/M4V, and supporting OGG/OGV instead. The quality of the Firefox video is slightly inferior since I've had to put the video through two lots of compression (AVI > M4V > OGG), but hopefully in a future update Firefox will support MP4s so everything can be uniform. Or a good OGG converter appears - my attempts at finding one have resulted in me discovering SUPER, which does a good enough job at the actual converting, but takes far longer to start up than it does to convert. And I have to put an M4V through rather than the original AVI, because it adds a random green bar to the bottom of AVIs. Incidentally, I'm using Handbrake for the M4Vs.

The videos then fall back to Flash in Internet Explorer (playing the MP4 file rather than FLV to save another convert and upload). I doubt IE will support HTML5 this decade, so I guess Flash will be around a while yet. Not that that's a bad thing - Flash is great. But not so good for video, even though it has been the standard for so long.

I plan on creating a custom interface for the videos but for now I've allowed the default browser interface to be displayed, with a simple 'play' graphic over the top.

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Toy car F1 project update

Posted in category Work In Progress | 1133 views

20/02/2010 @ 21:59

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A quick video to show progress on the project I'm currently working on, along with a model of the real life car I created a while back for comparison.

Toy car update

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My next project

Posted in category Work In Progress | 1221 views

16/02/2010 @ 21:58

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Has an engine...

lego next project

... and is going to involve lots of these.

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How to Build a Car Rig in 3ds Max

Posted in category Reports | 1844 views

06/02/2010 @ 00:43

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This is a project that formed part of my postgraduate degree which I have continued to improve afterwards, and the videos in this post should demonstrate some of its functions. I'll also explain the methods used, although I won't go into too much detail, but feel free to ask me about any specifics in the comment section after the post.

The intention of the rig is so that you can quickly and easily animate a vehicle that has been modelled without having to worry about the physics, as the rig will handle that with scripts.

The project started off life as a reactor-based rig, which was fairly easy to set up, and can be seen in a tutorial I wrote on building it. This method works well for simple animations, particularly over bumps, but I found to be quite limiting for manipulating the steering or for swapping the vehicle for another one without having to change all the settings.

I soon decided that scripting was the way to go. I followed techniques similar to this tutorial. I didn't actually follow this tutorial, but it does contain many of the techniques I did learn how to do, and I wish I'd have found this while constructing my rig. The main difference is that that is designed for a tank with tracks, while mine needed to be to suit any four wheeled vehicle, which I later expanded to allow any (even) amount of wheels, but not tracks.

The first thing I needed to do was to allow the wheels to determine where the ground was, so they could travel up and down terrain. This allowed the vehicles to not be stuck in flat, boring car parks. To do this, as in the tutorial mentioned above, I used the Conform tool on a plane and attached the wheels to it. I then used a spline curve as the path and made the conformed plane controller move along the path.

I now had a path and height sorted, the next thing was for the wheel rotation. A scripted expression was needed for this and required knowing the radius of the wheels, the length of the path, and the percentage of the path that the vehicle is situated at any given moment on the timeline. After adding these as variables in an expression for the z-axis rotation of one of the rig's wheels, the following expression should then calculate the correct rotation at each frame:

((pathpercent*(distance*100)*pi)/(pi*rad))/100

where pathpercent is the current percentage along the path that the vehicle has travelled, distance is the total length, and rad is the radius of the wheel.

Car rig expression

The rig was now at a point comparable to reactor, minus the bump physics, but allowing the vehicle to have direction without having to pause the simulation and create new settings. The problem with the direction change is that the wheels remained pointing forwards, rather than in the direction the car intends to travel - it needed steering. This was done in a similar way to the wheel rotation, in that it was done with expressions, although it required further objects to be placed in the scene. One such object was for a marker to follow along the spline curve path slightly ahead of the path that the main rig is about to travel. This meant there was a way of knowing which direction is coming up, and so the wheels could face this direction, taking care to ignore the axis controlling the wheel rotation.

The final major obstacle was getting the vehicle to bank realistically on corners or when traversing bumps. In the following image, you can see a couple of controller points to act as the main chassis, and these were used by adding position and orientation constraints in the motion wheel tab, then making the geometry that is following the spline curve bank on corners and using appropriate settings, and making one of the two objects in the rig mirror this position. The other object remains static. A third object is then placed and takes the average orientation of these two objects, and it is this that the main body of the model will be attached.

car rig rig

For acceleration and braking banking, the current speed was calculated using an expression, and set to a slider manipulator in the interface, and this speed controls two objects in the world space, one of which moves in the vertical axis depending on the speed. The difference between the two objects (one of which remains static) is then used to determine how much the car should rock forwards or backwards - ie, it calculates how much the speed has changed from one frame to the next. This is then multiplied by a multiplier variable set by the user using a slider manipulator to control how much the car should move - so how stiff the suspension should be. An F1 car for example would have stiffer suspension than a road car and thus be less visually active on weight shift.

The rig is controlled by the user using sliders (create > helpers > manipulators > sliders), which are tied to various elements of the rig. Things like the wheel size and heights of the front vs the rear wheels, ride heights and wheel base and widths can all be controlled, allowing easy addition of any wheel-based vehicle. Other elements such as the steering look-ahead, steering override (to allow for oversteer - see below), speed and weight shifts are also controlled in this section to cater for different vehicles - a truck will clearly behave differently to a Mini Cooper, but they can both be used on the same rig without needing to change any of the scripts.

rig

The sequence below will demonstrate how to add a custom model to the rig, and give a further insight into how the rig is put together.

Start slideshow
car-rig-sequence

And that's the basic story of the rig. I went on to add further controls such as oversteer and the ability to add a driver, and these can be seen in the Motorway F1 video. The oversteer, which is a slider attached to the y-rotation of the main rig, ties in with the steering override, and is to be done manually, as it is difficult to predict how much oversteer is required. Wheelspin is a further addition and behaves in a similar way, allowing the front and rear wheels to rotate independently and at varying speeds, or to behave normally - this is a choice left to the animator.

I hope this helps someone, and that I have the balance between detail and being boring right.

Links to other videos containing the car rig on my site:
Motorway F1
Bugatti Veyron vs Eurofighter Typhoon
Reactor Physics
Car Rig Tutorial - 3dsmax
Car Rig - WRC
Car Rig - F1

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