For the longest time I tried to build this complex roller coaster scene and it never went anywhere. I wanted to build a theme park around it or do some cool materials on it, but I could just never get it to become anything that wowed me. Basically I built the track around the text, and unfortunately I had to keyframe the cars to death, this doesn’t run on some sort of physics system.
I thought I could use an Align to Spline tag, but the animation wasn’t smooth enough because the car had to slow down and speed up fluidly on certain parts of the track. And it took me back to high school physics when we discussed roller coasters, and from that I learned that each car in the coaster makes up the speed in terms of the system, which is the combination of all the cars combined. So each car had to be angled and positioned individually, instead of just cloning a couple cars and being done with it. It was a huge hassle, so that’s why there are only 4 cars, because it took forever to put them in the right position.
All in all it’s OK, I purposefully kept the camera far back so you wouldn’t notice a few sketchy details.
4 Responses to “Short & Gray: Roller Coaster in Cinema 4D”
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Awesome smooth animation from afar, belive that it would not be bad if it is up close. Would really appreciate if there is a tutorial on it.
Thanks Liqarne,
I’m working on a tutorial for a different topic right now, and I may have a MoDynamics one soon as well. There are a ton of tutorials already on the subject, so you could definitely find one to get you started.
That’s a really nice idea. Does the coaster loop?
Thanks. Yes it could in theory, but the idea is that it starts and then rises up the incline slowly like a real coaster, so there would be a start and stop point for the coaster.