Serious Issue? 4-Wheeler Extended

[marcus]

Hello
I have been a rendering * for about 3 years and recently it became necessary for me to learn animation. One of the most common things I did was render realistic cars in motion. I had been adviced to take a look at your tools to make my life easier but quickly came to a craching stop. I find our studio rigs overwhelming and far more complicated than the craft ones, but that is not the issue of course, nor the fact that the animation looks like a 10 year old pc simulation at default setting.

My BIGGEST concern in this tool is that before I even started to tweak anything I couldn't find the rig object assigned to the breaks and their surrounding bits and pieces. Which made me STOP instantly. No matter how good the simulation could be, without breaks etc turing WITH the wheels i.e. side to side NOT around, I would say the plugin is pretty much useless for realistic car productions, at least anywhere one could see the wheels at a reasonable distance.

I think this is a fantastic idea i.e. using a simulator to animate but assuming the above is correct (no brake rig) It is useless for me and is thus overpriced. The price could easily be justified, if we could use it in production with realistic cars.

Hopefully there is some missing setting which I didn't see but at the moment I have to spend countless out-of-work hours learning how to animate cars and I am exhausted. A high quality simulator would be an obvious purchase for me.

Regards

Marcus

[Carl Buhre]

Hello Marcus and welcome to the forum. Are you sure you used Craft 4-Wheeler Extended and not Craft 4-Wheeler?

The dummy object you're looking for is WheelCenterMesh_<XY> (named "WheelBottomMesh_<XY>" in the picture below, it has since changed name) and is only available in Craft 4-Wheeler Extended and not in Craft 4-Wheeler.

Below is a picture of Craft 4-Wheeler Extended and its parts:


X = Front/Back
Y = Right/Left

The WheelCenterMesh_<XY> will turn with the wheel and if you parent a breaking setup to it, it will stay fixed and not rotate with the wheel (but will turn with the wheel).

[marcus]

Oh, you might be right. I tried this over a week ago so can't remember. Will definitely try this again but I'm working 12 hours per day at the moment and too busy to learn

One thing that confuses me in that case: Why is your demo video on 4 wheel and 2 wheel extended doesn't attatch the breaks to this dummy object? It looks really silly (bike).
So far, the demos I've seen don't look like they are based on Newtonian physics. I've personally had my fun skidding cars and know what is completely unrealistic.
However, I will give this plugin a proper go next week before I conclude anything unapropriate
Thanks for looking into this, I'll let you know how I get on. Hopefully the maual is thorough so I can test everything.

Cheers

[Carl Buhre]

Oh, you might be right. I tried this over a week ago so can't remember. Will definitely try this again but I'm working 12 hours per day at the moment and too busy to learn

One thing that confuses me in that case: Why is your demo video on 4 wheel and 2 wheel extended doesn't attatch the breaks to this dummy object? It looks really silly (bike).
So far, the demos I've seen don't look like they are based on Newtonian physics. I've personally had my fun skidding cars and know what is completely unrealistic.
However, I will give this plugin a proper go next week before I conclude anything unapropriate
Thanks for looking into this, I'll let you know how I get on. Hopefully the maual is thorough so I can test everything.

Cheers

What we have focused on in our tutorials is making sure that the basic features are covered. All of our manuals/help documentations contains a getting started section to help new users understand how to use our tools. The video tutorial for Craft 4-Wheeler Extended, found on our site, is also very basic and is mostly a video presentation of how you use it.

I don't know what 2-Wheeler Extended video you're talking about though, are you sure you've seen it on our site?

Please let me know how you're getting on and if you have any questions, comments and/or feedback please let me know either via our forum or e-mail.