Rollercoaster JAM

Have some extra time on your hands?
Why not have fun building a Rollercoaster.

How would you do it?

Don't want to build a whole track?
Intimidated by animation?
Just build one car and someone else can animate with it.

Like to animate but to impatient to model?
Design a track with someone else's car.

To get things started, I built a simple test simulation.
I only wanted to get the physics of the "coaster" looking good
so it slows down and speeds up properly as well as banking in the turns.

I also added two cameras, one from the riders point of view and one looking at the rider.

rollercoaster.gif
 

Attachments

  • Rollercoaster.zip
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To make the track surface I took the two splines, the Path Spline and the Rail Spline, and copy and pasted them into a Loft Creator.

I set the Loft's U parameter to 300 and the V to 1, which gave me a wall that defines a vertical center line through the cars.

To that I added a Shell Modifier set to .07, which is half the track width. Split the "track" portion and then
use the same technique to make the other half of the track and then delete everything you don't need.

Then Merge the two halves and Optimize to weld them together.

RollercoasterTrack.jpg
 
In this one I had the camera Parent Tagged to a virtual car slightly in front of the first car.
But I didn't like the pitching motion front to back, I just want some side to side action.

 
Looks good. I think you should add some reference objects on the sides of the rail to appreciate the action better from that POV.
 
Maybe adding a great big (radius) torus around the whole stage to emulate a distant, minimal horizon line.
 
I still have to build the trucks/wheels, rails, supports, ground and background.

It looks like it should be in a mall parking lot.

What will be finished first, the virus or me?
 
Luckily I've been practicing social distancing for a lot longer than the virus has been around.
I've been using a grocery delivery service, but the store is out of so many things like water
and the order I lust placed won't be delivered until tomorrow evening. :eek:
 
Luckily I've been practicing social distancing for a lot longer than the virus has been around.
I've been using a grocery delivery service, but the store is out of so many things like water
and the order I lust placed won't be delivered until tomorrow evening. :eek:

Stay safe. Here in Mexico many people are not taking it as serious as they should. I barely leave home once a day to the seven eleven two blocks away. I hope I'm wrong, but the way people is behaving we're going to be hit hard. Mathematically, today is the day when infections will start to be significant, the next two weeks are critical.
 
I got inspired and whipped this up (whoops hijack).
0928-CTr-LRT-Rollercoaster-3.jpg
0928-CTr-LRT-Rollercoaster-3a.jpg
0928-CTr-LRT-Rollercoaster-3b.jpg


Makehuman characters and modified stock models and photography.

Actually I didn't whip it up, there was a lot of effort ;) This was for a Calgary Transit ad saying the city's trains were open for 24 hour service during the city's exhibition.

--shift studio.
 
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I'm was working on the linkage between the cars when I realized I had made a mistake.

The Spline Tracking Tag uses the pivot point of the object being tracked and
I placed my cars pivot point at the contact point between the wheels and rails.

This caused the linkage extreme angle and length changes.

So I moved the cars pivot points level with the linkage.
This reduced the changes dramatically.

link_check.gif


 
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