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I know there's a few automobile modelers on this forum, this thread is for them. While animating a car turning a corner on my city street back lot, I realized that keeping the center (black) bone of a model tangent to a sharply curved path only produces believable results for short (in the Z direction) models. When a longer object, like a car (or pickup truck), goes around a tight curve both the front and rear wheels do a lot of sliding with respect to the ground. After some experimentation, I have a suggestion that may require some (perhaps painful) re-working of existing models but will pay dividends if you want your models to turn tight corners convincingly and steer themselves in the bargain (eat your heart out Waymo). The first step is to move the model so Z=0 is located at the rear wheels. This is no big deal if your building from scratch. But an existing model needs to have all patches (easy), all bones, center of groups and projection maps (time consuming in my case) shifted. The first assigned bone, the steering bone, controls the axles, steering pivots and wheels (children of the axles). This bone, starting at z=0, is oriented such that it's roll handle aims towards the front axle. After this the chassis and body are assigned a bone for rolling. The steering wheel gets its own bone for rolling. After setting up your action for stride length and wheel rotation, you need a few more constraints. The front wheel pivots are set to roll like the steering bone at 100% scaling. The body bone rolls like the steering bone with 20% scaling (or to your taste) while the steering wheel bone rolls like the steering bone with 500% scaling (or to your taste). The self steering part comes after you drop the vehicle on its path and add a null to follow the same path. Adjust the ease of both the null and vehicle such that the null is always located ahead of the rear axle throughout the length of the scene. I set it near the front axle. Then add a constraint to the steering bone so it's roll handle always point at the null. The result is fairly believable vehicle dynamics; exhibit A being the attached 47 sec. clip. And this is before any tweaks to the truck's ease to make it speedup and slow down as you may see fit. pickup_steering_lores.mp4

Hello, This is Rusty, an ancient AM (circa 2002-2009) user looking to get back into it again. Try to bare with my clumsy questions...its been a long time. First I need to finish the character models and wardrobes that I've already put thousands of hours into. My characters are just heads...everything below the neck is wardrobe (I connect head to wardrobe in the chor or an action depending)... TMS2 Question... Can someone remind me of what the status is of what use to be called the Anzovin TMS2 rig (I think that's what it was called)? If memory serves originally it was a couple of plug-ins you purchased from Anzovin then I think at some point it came packaged with AM...then, I think it stopped working with AM and you had to have an older version of AM (which one I can't remember) to install this rig though after that it could be used in the current AM version. This is the rig I had the most luck with. If there is a link to how to use it with the current version of AM that'd be nice. Other rig (2008?) There was also another rigging system being developed...it was more advanced and, at that time I never got to actually use it as new versions were coming out too fast but it was cool. Anyway, how's that project doing (or a link to current documentation on it)? Head Rig Any current info or links on this? This rig had a control superset which surrounded the face...you could hide the controls, use single controls for right and left or separate controls for each side. Cheers, Rusty

I made a skeleton for one model, and have several other models that are similar. How can I save the skeleton and use it in another model. Is there a way to export just the skeleton?