Bag: I used premiere to edit some playblasts together.
A little update from here. Getting it to work with two cars was much harder than I thought. But it seems to work now, at least for my stable simulation. Will try the other one later, I expect a lot of headaches.
I’m starting to hate mayas dynamics. :argh:
Oh, yeah, ignore the beginning. I let the wagons drop onto the track and give them a little shove, so it might look strange.
I think I finished my setup. The second sim works now too. It’s entirely gravity and collision based, so I can do whatever would work in reality. But because of the two cars attached to each other it is really unpredictable sometimes.
I took out the suspension, to keep calculation time at a minimum and because it looked wrong on a mine car.
Now it’s time to design the track. :twisted:
That look very awseome! I love the mine cart style trains! Good luck on making a full coaster track! I wish i couyld how to use reactor to do that
Are you sure you wanna ride it? But only at your own risk. :twisted:
I did a “little” modelling and track designing these days. This is taking much more time than expected. I hope to finish it in time.
Nice track design. And great idea to place it inside a cave. This reminds me to do a little bit of track and wagon design on my own.
Frank
Wow! This bumping-system is a great idea. Good work!
The cave thing reminds me a lot of indiana jones, aswell as the jumps and stuff.
I guess that#s where your inspiration came from.
Here we go:
Coaster Hellride. (very strongly inspired by Indy 
)
Edited and rendered with all the bells and whistles: (Quicktime, 19 Mbyte)
A plain shaded animation: (Quicktime, 11 Mbyte)
I used Maya for all the stuff. It took me quite some time to come up with the simulations and for the final every cave took about 2 days from scratch to finish (plus a lot of rendering time).
The only keyframes are on the lift in the beginning and of course the cameras.
The whole simulation is divided into 8 parts, sometimes the break is clearly visible since I didn’t match the speeds correctly, shame on me. (you’ll see all the the cuts in the plain animation)
I used two different approaches to simulate the train. Here is a picture of the actual simulated geometry:
The upper sim is entirely gravity based, the “wagons” are sliding over the tracks and connected to each other. They are not connected to the track, therefore I use this sim for the jumps and gaps in the tracks. I would have used it for the whole animation, but Maya has got some serious problems with collisions, which make this sim really buggy and unusable for long and complicated tracks. See my wip for some details.
So I came up with the second one, which is a little bit more complicated. Here I use a custom expression for the movement of the locators along the track-spline. The expression calculates speed and position based on the incline/decline. The 8 boxes are connected to these locators and the “cars” sit losely through collsion on them, allowing some freedom for the cars - you will see them nearly fall over or jump of the tracks in hard curves or bends with close to 0g.
The wheels rotate using an expression calculating the covered distance in world space, that’s why they also rotate while the lift is going up.
All this freedom took a lot of trial and error for the track design, you don’t want to know how often it flew off my track. :argh: And it creates the strong shaking you see at high speeds in the curves. Part of the problem is, that the track is still made of polygons with their limited tesselation.
As always there is sooooo much still to fix (especially the edit, which ruins some things), but I hope you like it. I had a lot of fun creating it.
Nico
Absolutely fricking brilliant!
You may have been the first one I had seen, but my gawd! Sure there is stuff you could correct (main one I noticed was the double bounce-track into the cavern: seemed too fast and cheesy), but damn boy.
Once I get off of work, I’m gonna have to check the others to see what they have. So far, I love it. Great amusement, fast, great directing and concept.:buttrock:
WOW 
Thats really nice, Great job. The editing is very well done. Only if you could have fixed the shaking part, it would be perfect. But I kind of like the shaking, makes it feel faster.
I like your simulation setup, a lot simpler then mine. How long did it take to calculate the simulation? As far as visuals go, I’d say you have everyone beat so far.
One other question, how long did it take to render the final mov?
wow, great job colt, that was excellent, i liked the music too :), nothing distracted me from the fun of the ride. 10.
That’s amazing. Really a great ride and fun to watch. I don’t want to imagine how much work you have put into tuning all those simulations…
Yes indeed, fun ride.
the music matches also very good and the editing is nice.
The jumps do look a bit unnatural to me, but for the fun it’s cool. Great work!
Dude, that was just amazing.
One Major let down for me was the Camera shots. U used to many. And you cut too much from one camera to another.
As i was getting used to one view it suddenly cut to another. Too many times.
Thats my only crit.
Congratulation whether u win or not. Outstanding work.
It was awsome…I’m quite impressed. I used to consider myself an fx guru but this is just insane. I can’t imagine the amount of work you had to go through in order to achieve these simulations, having to deal with this kind of work myself in a daily basis.
I would love to take a look at some of yours scenes if it was possible and I would be happy to share techniques in the future.
Regards,
Fer-
