CGTalk - Dynamic Tire Tracks

Moguri

01-04-2007, 11:45 PM

I have a scene with a buggy going between some large desert mountains. I want to make a set of tracks that follow the buggy so I can change its couse and have it do a "donut" in the sand. I thought about doing the soft body technique, but the buggy is too small in comparison to the scene to make this practical. I thought about doing a moving ramp, but the circular donut makes that impractical as well. I would like to make a curve that draws on the surface as the car is moving and feed that drawing into a displacement map. We are using mentalray for the rendering. I've seen these types of dynamic tracks done in video games, so I can't imagine it would be too much of a leap to do this in maya. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

Matt^

01-05-2007, 03:26 PM

One method is to have the car emitting particles from the wheels which are set to displace the mesh. The downside of this is the mesh has to be quite dense for the displacement since its happening to the polys and not at render time. You can however just have higher poly strips of the mesh where the tracks are going to go.

I don't know specifically how you'd do it in maya, but in max its done by converting the paricles to geometry with the 'mesher' compound, and then using them to displace the mesh with an xform modifier.

Moguri

01-06-2007, 06:32 AM

Thanks for the reply. I'm trying to figure out some sort of a texturing solution. If I did it in geometry, it would need upwards of 30,000,000 faces to cover the different camera angles. I've seen tracks left by vehicles in almost every car game made since 1998 and would like to know how its done and if a similar effect can be done in maya. Thanks again,
Moguri

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