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Activity Forums Maxon Cinema 4D building a Crazy Psychedelic Space Mountain ride!

  • building a Crazy Psychedelic Space Mountain ride!

    Posted by Brett Celinski on April 30, 2011 at 6:14 pm

    Sup cow. I’m fairly new to Cinema 4d (a few days) and coming from Max and Maya, I really enjoy how user-friendly and easy it is.

    I am working on an animation that involves a camera soaring along a wild Space Mountain style path, a la Contact and Stargate.

    I have the general idea down. I will use a bezier curve and sweep nurbs to create the road and then attach the camera to the spline.

    What I am trying to figure out is the best way to generate a wild path full of loops, twists and turns. Is there any other way to create such a path other than manually moving about each point on the spline in 3d space? Such an animation has to go along for at least 3 minutes, so manually making each loop and twist seems a bit painstaking. Is there a more efficient way to generate such a long path?

    I am reading through the help files about working with splines but have not found a detailed explanation yet. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

    Brett Celinski replied 15 years ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • David Biederbeck

    April 30, 2011 at 7:03 pm

    Check this out for inspiration…

    https://beeple-crap.com/c4d/zune.zip

  • Brett Celinski

    April 30, 2011 at 11:04 pm

    Thanks Dave, that is helpful.

    Still working on the path, but my camera seems to flip over on the loops and goes onto the bottom of the “road”, even when I duplicate the path spline and offset it so the camera won’t get blocked by the nurbs “road” I created with nurbs sweep. It seems to have something to do with the way I moved the points of the spline path, but I can’t figure it out yet.

    Thanks!

  • Adam Trachtenberg

    May 2, 2011 at 5:29 pm

    At the end of the day I think you’ll probably just have to draw the path spline, but you could try generating one by applying the MoGraph Tracer to a particle or MoGraph clone, as in this quick-and-dirty example: 2291_coasterspline.c4d.zip

  • Brett Celinski

    May 2, 2011 at 8:02 pm

    Hey Adam and Dave,

    Your example is definitely a cool method to use elsewhere in my project, but I think I’m going to draw the path manually anyway. Dave, I don’t think I adequately responded to your suggestion, but your file is very inspirational and gives me plenty of good ideas! I’ve done about three different versions so far. Your help is appreciated!

    I’ve run into another newbie problem. On one path so far I used align to spline on a null and parented the camera to the null and clicked tangential, where it worked fine. On another file, however, the null flips on its axes when I check the tangential box, flipping the camera upside down. It’s done this on every subsequent attempt. I know it has something to do with the rotation order, but I can’t quite figure it out yet. Ongoing help is appreciated; this forum is great!

    Brett

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