I have two problems with animating cars. First is that added cars are moving horizontally along the path (dancing effect ), see movie1. I used master string from MX and also i tried to add “normalize spline” to my paths but i still have the same result. Is there anything else i can do about it?

And second problem (movie2). I did want that my cars follow terrain, so i did attached triangulation from bridges to the rest of the design and add set parent surface from placed object manager. Nice, my cars are driving on the bridge, but the cars which are supposed to drive on the road below… are jumping onto the bridge :/ how can i solve this problem?

Mon

PS i cannot add movies, they are a bit more then 300KB… but i count on your imagination

With the first problem, the very first thing to check is whether your global shift coordinates are correct, but I guess they would be because I know we have discussed this in the past. Could you send the animation to me by email, and perhaps an extract from the max file with just the parent shape object and an attached vehicle?

With the second problem, I would suggest splitting the triangulation into separate parts by using “Face Sub Object” mode in the VIZ Modify Panel, and detaching the asphalt triangles from the lower surface into another object.

Surface tracking does work very well, but it literally sends an intersecting ray vertically down from the heavens - the first part of the parent surface it intersects provides the tracking data.

Monika, I’ve taken a look at your MAX file, and managed to solve the problem by applying a normalize spline modifier to the parent string with a segment length of 20. A segment length of 10 would also probably work.

You said that you had already tried this, but the only thing I can think of is that you may have applied the modifier to the wrong shape - I note that you have more than one imported master string (with differing string labels) in the same location in your DVSP model.

One thing I noticed is that this master string in particular contains a very high point count - the points are just one metre apart. This is a prime candidate for a normalize spline modifier.

Generally the closer the points on any parent shape that you are using as the path for an animated object, the more inaccurate the animation will become. The normalize spline modifier is used to reduce the point count to a more manageable figure, effectively optimizing the spline geometry.

Thanks! I’ll try it once again with my new visualisation!