failed truck animation

Question Animation


I am so confused.  I have three questions about the above animation, which is very,  very rough and incomplete.  
1.  The wheel rotation looks awful and I don't understand why.  They actually rotate correctly when you just move the main control in the viewport.
2.    The wheels are penetrating the speed bumps.   If I use my original ground and edit it the wheels act like they should.    In the render case simplified has been turned on and the subdivisions are set to zero, which I don't think should really matter, but am so confused I have no idea at this point.
  - solved :   the speed bumps on the ground wrap are shifted from the ones on the ground, so I think this is fixed if line them up better.  It works on the ground wrap correctly.
3.  When I look at the animation not in camera mode there is a sense of (to me) of acceleration from the start to the speed bumps and again from the speed bumps to the jump.  To me this get totally lost when the camera view is used.
4.  On the plus side could add the steering wheel and bone to animate it and add Melvin.
Any help would be appreciated, since I am currently out of any ideas, definitely time to take a bread.
Thanks 
T.
  • Omar Domenech replied

    Well I'm not much of a rigger, I can't help much, but your first question reminded me of when Wayne talked about how wheels get perceived when they rotate, that if they go a certain speed they seem to move backwards even and you have to hack your way through. Here in the rotation stuffs:

    https://cgcookie.mavenseed.com/lessons/off-road-rotating-stuff

    Your third question reminded me of a video I saw about the perception of speed in a train depending on the camera lens you used. The more narrow the field of view the slower it seemed. So maybe things will just seem different depending if you look from the viewport or your camera depending on your settings. Here's the link to the video.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54Oy75Bnu_Q

    It's not much of a help, but I hope it helps in some way.

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  • Shawn Blanch replied

    Yeah the wagon wheel effect looks like it is happening in the recording.

    You're animation is really coming along though. Despite the issues you are facing it is definitely coming together and the wheels turn and shocks behave well.

    When the camera orbits around it can sometimes be hard to judge everything that is going on. You might try to stabilize the camera movement while troubleshooting (or just add another camera for troubleshooting purposes only).

    1 love
  • Adrian Bellworthy replied

    I agree with the answers so far.

    It does look like your wheel rotation is a little too fast, how many frames are you using for one loop of the track?

    There was a guy some years ago, Einstein was his name, Albert Einstein, he once wrote about time dilation - the theory of relativity.
    In this case, when you view the animation from the perspective of the camera, which is travelling at the same speed as the car, albeit rotating around the car, the variations in speed are less or unnoticeable, compared to a static view of the car racing around the track.
    You can see the speed variation from the camera view if you focus on the background and not the truck.

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