MadCar (Plugin for Car Animation)

#41

I am sorry. It is too old version.

#42

While the car thing is excellent, I’m curious: Tell me more about this movie - and the trees! Are those procedural!?! :eek:

/Z

#43

I’m so greatfull!! FANTASTIC!!

#44

I try. Anyway, thank you very much again.:applause:

#45

Eh eh, You’re right man! It’s time for me to update…
Thanx anyway

Bye

#46

Really great job. It’s obvious that this software has a great future.

However, I noticed few more or less serious problems so far:

Selecting Mental Ray in Max 9 will cause it to crash, while selecting default scanline render returns an error message: Object <MadCar> doesen’t implement GetRenderMesh- can’t render. Currently only VRay works for me

When I try to link various car parts to MadCar controller, those parts simply flip randomly which makes them almost impossible to align to skeleton. Am I doing something wrong? Car parts are grouped meshes. Could this cause this problem?

Thanks again for your great work

#47

hi

for mental ray must you set “render disable” in the object properties from the madcar object.

mfg
hot chip

#48

I had similar problems at first attempt, wheels flipped around etc, tried at first fiddling around with the objects(wheel geomtry etc) pivot points, dind’t do any good, then added a dummy as the front wheel etc etc, and linked my car render geometry to suitable dummy object, worked fine after that,

cheers,

k.

#49

Thanks Thorsten, that worked like a charm.

Slugger, that makes sense, I will give it a try

[edit] Slugger’s suggestion works! Using dummy objects solves all alingment problems. :bounce:

#50

Use Affect Object Only for alignment. (See image below)
http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/4544/opshn3.jpg

#51

Great. Now it’s ok. Thanks

#52

Really nice plugin. However, I can´t get the car to follow the skeleton object. I linked the car as you describe in the document. I´ve tried both with groups and merged meshes. I´ve done nothing with the default settings but changing wheel width.

Can I use it for commercial projects or just for personal purpouse?

#53

Hello,

i tried to start MAx with both .dlo-data in plugin-folder. But i always get the message: MAdCar32x.dlo failed to initialize.

Whats wrong here? I have WinXP with MAx8 running. Same Problems with Vista.

#54

Wow, just spent the past hour playing with this, very cool!

I wanted to ask again, can we legally use this on commercial jobs? (Is that car model okay to re-use, etc.)

Fun stuff, thanks again, am going to keep playing to see what kind of stuff I can do with this.

Edit:
Also, vray doesn’t want to render this over backburner because of this error: “NULL mesh in StaticMeshInfo::compileGeometry()” so it looks like I’m going to need to strip the madCar object out of the scene once it’s animated in order to get it to render through backburner…

Edit2: As discussed above for mentalRay, disabling the “renderable” property of the madCar object seems to fix this issue for vray as well…

#55

Agreed, I REALLY REALLY want to know more about that! How are rendertimes with those things, the last part of the movie for example, the shot from the sky, was’t that extremely heavy to render ?

#56

Absolutely sweet, I can’t wait to play with that!

#57

It’s a great free plugin…2 questions for you:

  • path constraint?
  • multiple objects colliding?

I hope you introduce they in uploaded versions.

#58

By the way, I love the plugin. It has playing around with max like I have not done in some time.

I did have one question, I was sending a test to my render farm and the backburner will not let it render. Its says that it is saving the file then says sending job and it will be stuck there for ever. I have the plugin on my farm, and I can render just fine on my local machine. Is it something to do with how the script is storing the animation data?

thanks for your help,

Randall

#59

"Really nice plugin. However, I can´t get the car to follow the skeleton object. I linked the car as you describe in the document. I´ve tried both with groups and merged meshes. I´ve done nothing with the default settings but changing wheel width.

Can I use it for commercial projects or just for personal purpouse?"

Sorry for so long delay.

You can find simple tutorial of MadCar setup here http://www.evermotion.org/?unfold_exclusive=184&unfold=exclusive

You can use it for commercial project.

“Also, vray doesn’t want to render this over backburner because of this error: “NULL mesh in StaticMeshInfo::compileGeometry()” so it looks like I’m going to need to strip the madCar object out of the scene once it’s animated in order to get it to render through backburner.”

I fixed this bug. Please download plugin again.

" - path constraint?

  • multiple objects colliding?"

Sorry, but it isn’t main target at this moment.
I try to improve car dynamics.

#60

Thanx man. Really needed that link :slight_smile: . I´ll try that first thing tomorrow. Starting my job after a 2 week x-mas vacation.

Thanx again!