Current best Blender can do for vehicles?

#1 Nigel,

I think that your tutorials are the best I have ever seen RE Blender and this would be really great, have you seen the brave tree car content pack. This has the blender source files I belive. Maybe you should take a look at them.

#2 Nigel,

I think that your tutorials are the best I have ever seen RE Blender and this would be really great, have you seen the brave tree car content pack. This has the blender source files I belive. Maybe you should take a look at them.

#3 The maya/max setup is three keys a tire starting with hub0 first set the cars ride level that's were the hub nodes start all shocks are up! key 0,1,2 are hub0 its up key0 down key1 back up key2 animate your shocks
and move them with the hub shape don't overlap your keys. Ilf is what you need for taillights there is a lightwave TuT on that will give you the basics
hub0 key 0,1,2
hub1 key 3.4.5
hub2 key 6,7,8
hub3 key 9,10,11

#4 Thanks Dave - I'm going to look into it.

On the point of the BraveTree Car Pack - I've seen mixed reviews.
Can anyone confirm that it does have a fully functional .blend in it - not just a stripped down version?

#5 Thanks Dave - I'm going to look into it.

On the point of the BraveTree Car Pack - I've seen mixed reviews.
Can anyone confirm that it does have a fully functional .blend in it - not just a stripped down version?

#6 Very late reply, but the BraveTree car pack has a blender file which does not contain any spring or steering animations etc.

#7 I am sure that Blender can do the animations you are looking for. I have had no trouble creating animations for the player included all the blended ones. I cannot imagine the vehicle animations would be harder. They are certainly less complex. Also, you should be able to get blender to do most of the inbetweening if you use IK animations. The IK stuff lets you practically just do initial joint postures at the beginning of the animation. Walking animations are a no brainer.

Edit:

I am working on a vehicle to showcase the animation in Blender for vehicles. I will release the blend on a TDN page when I get it done.

Here are the animations I will implement:
Spring
Steering
Brake
Damage (I will attempt this if it is possible)

Anythiing else?

#8 Are Spring# Animations Blended or Unblended?
I got the steering animations to work, but I cannot get the spring animations to work. The code sees the animations as I get a positive result when the wheel animation sequences are loaded.

#9 I made my spring animations unblended. The steering animation is blended with the reference pose being set to steering center pose.

Spring animation is with frame 1 being top of travel and frame 2 being bottom of travel. Make sure you animate your hubs accordingly.

[edit] frame numbers

#10 For a brake animation create a brake light cover mesh with a glow texture (red fading towards edges), alpha on zero and self illumination on max etc.

Attach it to a bone and animate the bone so that frame 1 has the mesh hidden inside the vehicle and frame 2 pops it outside. Name the action brakelight and it will work with the default vehicle brakelight code. You can use other ways too, like scaling it down when you hide it etc.

I created indicator animations too but had to make some code changes to the vehicle class for those.

The only proble I still have is that mounting other meshes seems to place the mounted mesh in a weird location a few meters back or front of the mount point.

I was also going to do a TDN tut but go ahead, thats if you dont mind me adding/modding it as necessary.

#11 What version of Blender and exporter are you using. I kind of got one hub to work, but the rest just will not budge! I am using 2.4.2 with the patched version of the exporter to fix some problems.

#12 Okay, now I have just the one sequence working for the front right wheel. The other 3 are in the fully extended position. I am not sure what the problems is as I have done the exact same stuff for the other 3. I think this may be an exporter problem?

Heck, I just tried 2.4.1 with old version (prepatch) and new version and neither picks up the animation for the other 3 hubs.
I am back to trying 2.4.2 and it spits out the same as 2.4.1.

I also have the same problem with Torque 1.3, so it is not the engine.

All the sequences work in the show tool as well.

I am getting totally stumped.
Am I missing something in the datablock?

#13 @ Frank, I'll send you an email in a few minutes.

#14 Duncan,
I sent you a response, and I think I fixed your collision mesh.

#15 Watch out for IK. I describe what I found here:
www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=49589

The work around is to match (manually rotate/move) the bone orientation for each keyframe from an IK sequence. Not hard just tedious. You can use it, just not as easy right now as I would like.