Hello all
I am trying to animate a rollercoaster, I have already made the track and path to follow… I setup a test cube which represents a car and it follows correctly the path with my defined speed IPO…The problem now is that I would want to have simple multiple cars so a linked train when each char is liked with next car . I cannot use modifiers and deforming meshes
I’ve tried to make parents other cubes to curve but the start position point when they follow the track is wrong, only the first car follow correctly the path…I assume because the first car is positioned on the start vertex of the curve…
My question is : can I make follow a path multiple objects at different starting positions ??
Thanks in advance
I’d also like to know how to accomplish this without arrays along curves and deformation.
I know a couple of ways: if not using a constraint just enable Offset Children in curve data under Path Animation, then add some offset to cars under Animation Hacks.
The other way I would prefer is using a Follow Path constraint for each car, then enabling Fixed Position in constraint and animating the Offset value. So each car will have it’s own FCurve.
This is for 2.5x -you mentioned IPO curves so I warn you-
Remeber to reset location or origin for cars -Alt+G and Alt+O-
And do a search as there are some examples around.
edit: you can also play with Delta Transform values to offset your objects from the path
You may want to consider it like this…
Create a plane and subdivide it to create a face for every car in your coaster.
The plane should end up rectangular in shape with the required spacing to keep your cars convincing.
Then vertex parent each car to each face of the plane.
Now you can simply apply a curve modifier to the plane and animate that single plane moving along the curve. The cars will twist and turn as the plane does. This works in 2.49 and 2.5.
Attachments
roller_coaster_300907.blend (122 KB)
Thanks a lot for the suggested method…I was complicating my life duplicating curves as the number of cars, adjusting starting vertex point for offset …but these methods seems more fast and better so again thanks!
Hi, Atom, I created the plane like you suggested and then subdivided it and then selected the vertices of the plane, then (CTRL + Selected the car) and selected “Vertex parent” but I got an error saying: (Error - Select either 1 or 3 vertices to parent). How do i vertex parent the cube to the plane if it gives me the error. I don’t see how I can select 1 or 3 vertices?
Go into edit mode and select 1 or 3 vertices, then parent.
Here is a revised version of the roller coaster setup. It seems the previously posted BLEND file is not compatible with 2.6.1 anymore. This file is.
Attachments
26_roller_coaster.blend (464 KB)