Modelling a road animation

# 1 15-11-2010 , 05:22 AM

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Join Date: Feb 2010

Location: Australia

Posts: 4,255

Ok...just out of curiosity...as Im a Surveyor and eventually I will want to model a road animation (ie vehicles driving)...my query is this

If at 110km/h a car will travel 1.836 km /minute. Now if I say wanted to do an animation with music...say a 3.5 mins...this car will have to travel a minimum of 6.426 km.

1 : will Maya handle a road model that big??

2 : if not where would I find a tutorial for something like it??

Cheers bullet

P.S just as a test it will be a camera only...no car and the road will be low poly with a few tunnels and no scenery

bullet1968

"A Darkness at Sethanon", a book I aspire to model some of the charcters and scenes

Last edited by bullet1968; 15-11-2010 at 05:26 AM.

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# 2 15-11-2010 , 11:08 AM

The Nurb Herd
Join Date: Oct 2007

Location: London

Posts: 2,381

surely it depends on your scene scale. if you say 1 maya unit is 1km then your road will not even cover the grid.

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# 3 15-11-2010 , 12:16 PM

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hhhhhmmmmmm ok hammer...I have tried things to scale before and then created animation and the camera wouldnt show the entire scene (yes mate I know I have to learn more...LOL). I was just curious...so I would make the road first...then import my vehicle and scale that down to match the road...I assume?

cheers bullet

bullet1968

"A Darkness at Sethanon", a book I aspire to model some of the charcters and scenes

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# 4 15-11-2010 , 01:25 PM

The Nurb Herd
Join Date: Oct 2007

Location: London

Posts: 2,381

or decide on a scale and model the car and the road to the same scale.

110 mph = 49.1744 metres per second

so if you say 1 metre = 1 maya unit then your car will have to travel 49 units in 24 frames (assuming you are using film settings) or 25 frames if you are animating to tv standards.

so lets assume you are working at 25fps, say your animation is 210 seconds long or 5250 frames. and assuming you want your car to be in shot for the duration of the anim. you will need to have a road at least 257,250 units long.
might be a bit a bit too long user added image

so adjust your scale, or consider using more than 1 camera. (which would make it more interesting) if you have a few cameras you could work in multiple scenes. also 5250 frames is a lot of rendering on a home pc!

this would have taken 3 years to render on 1 machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdujaWzOa20
it was about 1500 frames.
more elements in this tho, so not really a good comparison

Last edited by honestdom; 15-11-2010 at 01:52 PM.

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# 5 15-11-2010 , 05:37 PM

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Interesting stats there hammer...thank mate...yeh I did a 1000 framer the other night...took about 5 hours on the lappy...thats with bugger all in the scene LOL so yeh it might take a while huh?? LOL

bullet1968

"A Darkness at Sethanon", a book I aspire to model some of the charcters and scenes

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