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Author Topic: Can I animate cars moving along a spline?  (Read 1513 times)

PGD

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Can I animate cars moving along a spline?
« on: January 18, 2021, 11:51:16 AM »
I'm looking to animate a number of cars moving along a spline over 50 or so frames. I've created the forest element, adding the car geometry to a path, which would be fine for stills. But can I animate the geometry moving down that spline?

Seems like it could be possible, easy even but I cant figure it out.

Cheers

Rokas

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Re: Can I animate cars moving along a spline?
« Reply #1 on: January 18, 2021, 02:44:29 PM »
You could if You used particles for the cars.
Simple demo:



Hope this helps
Rokas

PGD

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Re: Can I animate cars moving along a spline?
« Reply #2 on: January 20, 2021, 12:11:34 PM »
Thanks for that, it's a great idea but I don't know how to do it. I'll keep trying following your file.

Max is so complicated

Jens-a

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Re: Can I animate cars moving along a spline?
« Reply #3 on: December 08, 2021, 11:39:55 AM »
Is this still the only way to achieve this? I'm doing a shot from above a high way and have managed to scatter cars on the road long a spline via the "path distribution" option (can we please get an option to have a random interval of the distance instead of just a fixed number?). I "solved" the distance by adding empty objects to the geometry list, but still not optimal.

I tried to animate the "distance" spinner, to get some motion blur on the cars (it's just a still image), but it's not working.

Also tried animating the scattered proxy car before adding it to the FP geo list, but this doesn't seem to work either.

Paul Roberts

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Re: Can I animate cars moving along a spline?
« Reply #4 on: December 10, 2021, 11:25:51 AM »
There are a few limitations with motion blur in Fore Pack. Unfortunately, objects moved by animating Forest Pack's parameters don't generate motion blur. On the other hand you can add an XForm modifier to the source geometry and animate the gizmo to get a motion blur effect. However this doesn't work with V-Ray Proxies, so you'd need to import or XRef the cars as regular Max geometry (this won't affect the efficiency of instancing in FP)

Best,
Paul
Paul Roberts
iToo Software