[Jesse Stormer]

Because the bus jumps forwards and backwards, it leads me to believe that locations along the spline aren’t being calculated to a small enough decimal. Like it’s being rounded to the nearest tenth or hundredth? I honestly am feeling like this is a software issue, I can accomplish this in Max.

[Jesse Stormer]

I can’t have the camera be a child because I have it ‘Leave’ the bus all together at one point, it isn’t always with it. I see your point about having inconsistent numbers of points on each spline. But, I thought that was the point of the spline? That regardless of what location you are at on the spline, it is based on algorithm? That’s supposed to be the benefit of using a spline. Thanks for the help! I’ll try just adding pointless points just so that they might calculate more similarly.

[Jesse Stormer]

How I would do this:

Correct the perspective of the image using photoshop so that it is a ‘straight-on’ image, you want this to appear to be orthographic (straight on). (By doing this you also just made yourself a texture) Trace each brick with a spline, (bezier or b-spline) Extrude splines. Add bevel to the created bricks, add a noise modifier if you wish for it to be a little more imperfect.

Good luck!

[Jesse Stormer]

I searched for a good answer to this all day, and since this is at the top of google when you search ‘c4d train rig’, I thought I’d post my answer to the problem here.

My solution was to apply bones down the middle each train car, putting the start and end points where the wheels should be (front, and back). There should also be a bone extending from the back wheels of each car, to the front wheels of the car behind it. Having the bones at the location of the wheels is PIVOTAL (pun intended).

The start of the bone chain should be constrained to the path, but the rest of the bone chain can’t be constrained to it. So: this is where I was getting hung up. To simulate each bone being constrained to the path, constrain nulls to the path/spline at each location of a bone joint intersection. Then, tell that bone to ‘look at/target’ that null. Every bone must have a look at null for this to work, including the first bone in the chain. You have to fiddle a bit with percentages to get it perfectly right.

Tip: You want to have your spline path finalized before you do this rigging, because it is based on percentages. If you change the path, the actual location of each null will change.

Once you have your distance between each bone figured out using percentages on the nulls, make sure they are keyed, and you can duplicate those farther down your timeline, and your train will be able to animate consistently without spreading apart. You don’t want to try re-keying them, you already did the labor intensive work of figuring out what percentage on each null = what distance, just re-use that information.

So, in conclusion:
Step 1: Bones placed at wheels
Step 2: Path constrain bone chain root
Step 3: Path constraint nulls at bone intersections
Step 4: Bones ‘target’ the null at the beginning of the next bone in the chain.
Step 5: Keyframe ‘path constraints’, duplicate and slide keys down timeline to animate
Step 6: World domination

[Jesse Stormer]

Thank you! Turns out one of the people setting up the folder structure copied a bullet point out of word into the file name — AE does not like bullet points. Don’t just look at the file name, but the file location. If there is a weird symbol in the path AT ALL it will not accept the location of the file. It’s not denying you of the file, it’s denying you of the location of the file.

[Jesse Stormer]

thanks for that! the layer style was my problem too