Post Description

With DRIVE! you are able to create physically correct vehicle animations playfully easy. With just one mouse click you"ll get a ready-to-drive vehicle, which drivability can be edited by a variety of setting possibilities.

You can record the simulation as a conventional key frame animation and thus render or edit it on computer systems on which DRIVE! is not installed.


Physically correct vehicle animations

Perhaps you have already attempted to make an animation of a car. It is no big problem with a leisurely driving vehicle but as soon as dynamics become a factor ? for example, with an oversteering racing car or an off-road vehicle on rough terrain ? then it becomes much more arduous or almost impossible to achieve convincing results with classic key frame animation.

With DRIVE! you"ll be amazed how playfully easy it is to make an appealing animation of a car.

It"s not animated, it"s simulated: the basic principle

If you have ever used CINEMA 4D Dynamics then you are probably already aware of the principle: The objects and a framework of conditions are created by you and then the simulation creates the physically correct course of movement.

The DRIVE! plug-in will set up a complete basis car with one mouse click. Adjust the measurements of your 3D model and move the auto body and wheels into the appropriate container objects of the simulation. If you want to, you can now change the vehicle parameters to match your original model or to suit your own personal preferences. The figure on the right shows an overview of the many settings possibilities.

Let?s go! ? vehicle controls

Spline objects on which you can position speed markers allow you to determine the driving path. Moreover, you can directly influence acceleration, braking, steering, or turn ABS and traction on and off with command objects, which are to be envisaged as a kind of switch that is sunken into the ground.

For the ground, polygon grids, landscape and relief objects are supported. Various grip values can be allocated to these ? inside of polygon grids you can even allocate values for partial areas that you can define using weight mapping.