linking steering wheel rotation to madcar rigged vehicle.

[robin_lawrie]

Im having an annoying issue,

I want the steering wheel in my car to turn as the wheels do. its an offroad buggy rigged with madcar.
i had planned to use parameter wiring, with a multiplier on the rotation to control how much the wheel turns relative to the steering.
Unfortunately the obvious place to wire it (the dummy driven by the madcar damper object, which provides the correct rotation) is a linked object, so i cannot wire to its rotation. i cannot wire directly to the damper as it does not have actual rotation. i thought about using the exposeTM helper to get the rotation out of the dummy, but that only appears to work correctly in world space which is no use. the local rotations relative to the car shown in the helper dont seem to bear any relation to the steering position, even using the main chassis helper as the coordinate reference.

any other methods i might have missed? worst case scenario i can wire the steering after i have baked the animation from madcar to the car dummies, but id prefer to keep it all interactive.

[fixeighted]

I haven't used it in a long while but it should just work that by default.
I just had a quick look at the manual and that does seem to be the case.
I clipped a couple of relevant bits

[robin_lawrie]

no, maybe my message was too confusing. madcar works fine, ive been driving my buggy around. however i wish the steering wheel of the cgi car to turn realistically with the wheels, since the car is open topped and i wish to have a driver with his hands linked to the wheel. In fact, iirc, i may have done it before, possibly with your help rigging a biped to the steering wheel, many years ago, however for the life of me i cant find a way to link the rotation of the steering wheel geometry to anything in the madcar rig or any of its associated linked geometry. none of the methods ive thought of seem to work.

[fixeighted]

If I remember I'll have a look in the morning. There has to be a way to do that - seems so simple so I hope so

[fixeighted]

So yeah it seems to work for me if I wire the x rotation of the wheel dummy to the steering wheel's rotation.

EDIT: No that actually didn't work when subsequently doing the other necessary links, though I think I figured out a way to do it but haven't time to test it yet.

Basically the method here should work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g406_Dc5OYA&t=76s as it's doing exactly what you need, however it uses the zero xyz euler controller, which no longer exists.
So, I then found this page which suggests how to do it in recent versions. Half way down https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMA...2-BE5F379C4504

Hopefully that combo does what it says

[fixeighted]

I'm late going out so I did test that and it seems to now work.

Process is exactly as on the AD page, so I used a regular dummy linked to wheel just because, then the process of rotation list/lookat/swap axis order, link wheel to whatever et voila!

[robin_lawrie]

well i was writing to say that i needed a bit more explanation as to how the method you mentioned would work in my case (wiring rotation to reference an object that is rotating through a link) , when i revisited the exposeTM helper (which i remembered i used last time) to make sure id not made any stupid errors.

It was still refusing to work when exposing the rotation of the dummy linked to the madcar rig.. however for giggles i linked a new dummy to the one that is, in turn, linked to the madcar rig (so many dummies) , and the exposeTM helper reads the rotations from that just fine. go figure. wired my steering wheel to the exposeTM and all working as i wished. be nice to know why, but if it works, that'll do.

thanks for the replies and assistance Bart, hope you are all good

[fixeighted]

Ok cool - glad you got it working. It was, as always, a fun exercise to discover a solution in any case.
I'll have to have a look at the exposeTM thing - oddly unfamiliar with that.

Me? - I'm awesome, thanks

[robin_lawrie]

awesome is good yeah the ExposeTM is very useful in these type of scenarios. it reads and outputs the transforms of a selected object relative to another selected scene node. in this case the steering dummy rotation relative to the main chassis.