So, you’ve just finished the week/month long task of modeling your huge environment. You’ve got beautifully detailed architecture looking over expansive plains, beautiful HDRi lighting and environment maps, perhaps some of the most beautiful architectural landscapes ever created. But it’s completely lifeless. There are no people, no cars, no signs of life.
The “simplest” solution is to simply add in some vehicles. Car models are a dime a dozen these days, but animating a car to look lifelike is a nightmare. Believe me, I’ve tried it. First you need the drive path, that’s easy enough. Then you need the wheels to spin, the car to properly lean around corners, proper acceleration and braking maneuvers. A simple “drive by” can take days to animate realistically. Just imagine the pain of trying to animate something more complex, like a video game intro complete with screeching tires and power-slides. Vehicular animation is one of those things that is easy to do poorly, but painstakingly difficult to do well.
Enter Craft Animations and their amazing tools for 3dsMax, Maya, SoftImage, and Cinema4D. Available as a plugin for the system of choice, they turn vehicular animation into something as simple as a video game, literally. Their product is something so naive and intuitive that anyone can pick it up and become a vehicle-animating expert in mere seconds. Simply load in one of their “rigs” (4-wheeler, 2-wheeler, airplane, helicopter, etc) and attach it to your desired model (Match up the Wheels, the Axles, the Chassis, etc). Then, attach any game input device you like (USB Gamepad, joystick, or just use Keyboard and Mouse) and click “Record”. Then Drive. That’s it.
As you drive, all the action is processed internally by their own game physics engine which allows for realistic drifting, gravity effects, inertia, and more. You simply drive around the scene as it records all the details of what’s going on as a keyframe animation, suitable for editing in your own animation studio if you so choose (or for binding additional actors and objects to for later ragdoll or impact physics). If you mess it up, so what. Just click “Erase” and “Record” again, and try again. You can rewind to the last “good” point and record from there if you so desire.
The end result is that you can create realistic vehicle animations in mere seconds that would take you days or weeks otherwise. Don’t like the first one? Do another, it only takes another 30s. With the realistic physics, you may even find effects and tricks that you hadn’t even considered (extra draft on a helicopter during a turn, power-sliding around a corner at high-speeds) that lend additional realism to your animation with no extra effort. But the vehicles aren’t all, Craft offers several other things you can add to your package to increase the realism even further:
- Trailer Addons – turn your truck into an 18-wheeler complete with a full payload, or add new realism to that oil tanker before it flips and rolls down the highway.
- Crawler Rigs – Realistic tread & crawler simulations make tanks and ATV’s a breeze
- Missile Addons – realistically fire and track missiles from your helicopters and tanks
Fully Rigged Models – Need to add a vehicle in a hurry? Then use the new Pre-Rigged Models feature and import models from agencies like Dosch Design and PerspectX that are fully rigged and ready to go, no configuration necessary.- And many more.
I had a chance to take a helicopter for a spin, and was amazed. Helicopters are difficult to animate because of the incredible complexity in the flight physics. There is no forward thrust, only vertical lift so that the helicopter must lean forward to achieve forward momentum. The unique ability to hover, move directly laterally, and spin in place all create difficulties in realistically animating, but I had a helicopter flying between (and crashing into) some tall skyscrapers in mere seconds. The potential is amazing, and the simplicity of the entire tool simply has to be experienced to be believed. A demo version ships with 3dsMax2011, and I highly recommend you try it out.
Whether you work in gaming and build cinematics for high-end games, or work in architecture and simply need to add some generic traffic to a scene, it doesn’t get much simpler (and more FUN!) than the Craft Animation tools.
