tire tracks

[posterus]

hello,
anyone have a good method of animating tire/rubber marks of an out of control vehicle? what i've done is adjust a spline so that it follows the path of a wheel. i then take a plane and apply a path deform modifier and assign it to the tire path spline. i then animate the stretch spinner in the path deform modifier which stretches the plane along the tire path. i'm finding the process tedious because it requires tons of keys in order to keep the plane stretched in the right position relative to the wheel.
i curious how other have done this.
thanks,
-joe

[joconnell]

You could try using shape mark in particle flow to leave a card with a tire track on it although it mightnt make a perfect line.

You could do a render from underneath a plane with the tire protruding through and do a black and white pass - use this with something like the time echo effect in after effects and it should give you the marks left by the tire itself. You could then map this back onto the plane and use it as an animated displacement map.

Lastly you could make a pflow system linked to the tire but at the bottom where it contacts the ground. Get it to leave a trail of box particles that intersect your ground using spawn trails. Then you make a mesher object choosing the particle flow system so it make an animated mesh. Then use this animated mesh in a volume select applied to your ground plane fed into an xform that drags the polys down a bit - more of a displacement but it'll get a mark left.

You could map the ground from the side so that the polys get pushed into a darker part of a diffuse map.

[posterus]

thanks for the suggestions. i'll look into them.
-joe