I’m working on an animation for a car crash at an intersection. I need to know how to make the cars go at correct speeds in relation to eachother. Any ideas on how to do this would be helpful.
-uli
Make you cars follow each its own path curve.
If the paths cross each other at the same frame (more or less accordinly to the kind of collision you’re after but close anyway) the cars will hit around that frame.
Another way would be with key frames. Set up the movement of the cars beginning with the crash e.g at frame 250. Insert the key frames and then set up the start of the animation and the way inbetween.
The relative speed of the cars then would depend on the relative length of the ways for the two cars.
The speed of the whole animation could be tuned with a time ipo (the two cars should share the same time ipo)
Acceleration and deceleration best is tuned with shape of the loc ipos.
Alternatively one could do this with the time ipos. Depends on your preferences and the actual scene.
When I am trying to get a “realistic” feel in my timing, I find that having a referance AVI, no matter how crude in the background when I am setting up my timeline is a great big help.
A lot of that stuff that really bakes your math brain cell and still looks fake is more convincing if ya have visual referances to work from.
Maybe a case like a car crash is an especially good example of where this pays off. The object speeds are easy enough to model at constant or acceleration/decelatation velocities. but there is a lot of very subtle stuff going on when the passengers are flying thru the windshield and the motor is coming thru the grill. Those are the details that “sell” the animation and the story. I bet you could find ten examples at the video store of great car crash footage to get referance from.