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[Ursine]

I teach at an animation school whose 1 year program ends with the students producing a short film. Last year we did a ride film (http://www.daveschool.com/index.php/gal ... 187-zombie). We're planning on doing another one in the future so I was asked to make a motion simulator (new-2-dof-wiper-sim-t3448.html).
I knew I could program the sim with a joystick within the Video Plugin, but I wanted finer control of the motion as well as being able to edit the data with tools I'm used to using. I decided on Motionbuilder. It's an animation/motion editing program mostly used to edit and retarget motion capture data. I've been using and teaching Motionbuilder for years so I knew it was up for the task. I imported a simple proxy object of the sim seat. In front of that I placed a flat screen which played the movie we did previously. I restricted the rotation of the seat so it roughly matched that of the sim. From there it's an easy task of scrubbing through the movie and animating the chair to match the movements onscreen. Being able to go frame by frame allowed us to accurately time the motion to the movie.

Once we had all the movements, we exported as an Acclaim .amc file. This format is space delimited, so we wrote a simple Python script to strip off the header info and parse that data as comma delimited, just like the Video Plugin wants it.
Seems like alot of work, but really it isn't. Being able to go back and edit the motion data easily, makes it all worthwhile.
Video coming soon...

Dave

[motionrides]

What a great way to preview the motion. I hope to see a screencap video.

Are you able to restrict translation speed in Motionbuilder to approximate the motion of the platform?

I remember seeing the ridefilm online around the time it was first posted. It was a great student project. I hope you'll post here again when the next ride is finished.

[Ursine]

It's really helpful to visualize the motion this way. I have full control over the angle and speed. We're making some final twaeks to the motion file and hope to have a video up soon. The school liked the sim so much, they want 3 more built!

Dave