[Sanford Tong]

Thanks for the tip Brian – for some reason I was under the impression that the dynamic properties got lost without using mograph. That simplified things a lot!

For anyone interested, the solution was pretty simple in the end. Rather than turning the wheels, I just applied the target expression on the chassis, and made the wheels/connectors a child of the chassis instead of being grouped to the chassis. This seems to work regardless of friction level on the wheels, and although not realistic for closeups, is perfectly fine for the dinky toy animation I have in mind.

Thanks all for your help!

[Sanford Tong]

If you are open to upload your c4d file or a sample, we might be able to see spot where you’re having trouble.

[Sanford Tong]

Hello there,

Do you mean this kind of concept?

12114_crystalc.jpg.zip

Regards,
Sanford.

[Sanford Tong]

Hello again…

I’ve been playing with trying to rotate the front wheel to face the target, again using a target effector. I assume you need the Mograph cloner to do that. The problem I’m having then is that I can’t seem to get the hinge joint to rotate along with the wheels. As a result, the vehicle goes in a straight line anyway, regardless of the rotation of the front wheel. I’ve tried variants of nesting the hinge (inside the cloner grouped with the wheel itself, outside the cloner) and none of the combos seem to work.

Is this the point I should start thinking about Xpresso instead of a target effector? I was hoping for a shortcut! ☺

Thanks again,
Sanford.

[Sanford Tong]

Thanks for your replies!

I did try turning the front wheels separately (with the motor applied only to the rears) but the vehicle seemed to stop moving when I did that (it wobbled, so it was trying to do something, but couldn’t quite tell how it was getting stuck). I did also play with the friction settings, but then I couldn’t get the vehicle to take off properly.

I’ll give it another play, and see if I can find a balance that works. Thanks!

[Sanford Tong]

Hey all, just a few cents thrown into the pot…

The last week has been the most frustrating I’ve ever experienced, to the point where I was close to giving up on Vegas. Similar to people here and other forums on the net, I was experiencing intermittent and apparently random crashes during rendering. Tried reducing threads, 8 bit, dynamic preview RAM, etc., the works, and it still failed. I was resorting to render around 4-5 seconds of footage at a time, and even so it was crashing almost every other time. Whilst I love the look/feel of Vegas, I just couldn’t see how any tool that requires this amount of workaround could possibly be taken seriously as a ‘professional’ application.

Finally I read from somewhere about certain file formats not being ‘friendly for editing. I had a mixture of m2t, avi and wmvs (which was the output format I was exporing to from After Effects). Last night I identified and replaced ALL wmvs from my project with AVI (decoded using Divx @ 8Mbs for HDV), and this morning, I was able to successfully render the entire 6 minutes of footage first time. This project uses a large mixture of Vegas and Magic Bullet Looks plugins (located in both tracks and clips), as well as several Sonitus audio plugins, some transitions, automated pan/crops, etc.

So in short, m2t (from HDVSplit), and avi (DivX) are the two formats which seemed to work really well for me. Before this morning, I never would have believed that supposedly supported file formats can cause such extreme flakiness. However that’s what I found, and I hope it helps other people to figure out a scenario that works for themselves as well that they can stick with.

Cheers,
Sanford.