animate a roller coaster
 

I build a really good coaster, with loops and screws and so on. My cars are finished and now I want to animate the drive.
What would be the best way to animate it, that it looks real. Because it becomes importend that the speed is in the different parts right and the car is always on the tracks.
I think you don´t do that with key frame and also not with driven key.Because that is to circular. When you use the mothion path, first I don´t know how to attach the path to the tracks( that it fits) and second to rotate the car through the srews.
Has anybody any inputs for me!!!

ummm.... personally I'd go for a motion path. You would have to adjust the speed of the coaster (so it's faster going down slopes, slows at tops of hills, and so on), but it would allow for the best control, I think.
Actually, you'd probably want to go for a pair of them, one on each track. Then put a locator for each set of wheels, and point constrain the cars to the locators (so, most cars would probably have four locators). This would actually make the cars bank and otherwise 'ride' the tracks correctly.... (I think...).
As for creating curves that mimic the rails, you have several options. If they're polys, you should be able to snap curve points to the vertices during creation. If they're nurb surfaces, I think you could probably extract an isoparm or something like that (which might save you time).
Anyways, I think that's probably your best bet. Mind, you're going to also have to mess with offsets a little for things, and probably the best option for animating the wheels would be a script which tracks its locator's posistion along the curve, but those are relatively minor and easy. Probably the biggest obstacle would be getting the motion paths, actually...

Thank you Xander!
I hope I can cope this obstacle!?! Its really tricky to master that.
But "if" I finish that, I will show it.

( Why I´m not a Maya master )