Rigging Proxy Car

[emartin8907]

Hi,

I only recently started making CAD cars into vray proxies (about time!) and am now trying to wrap my head around rigging said proxies for animations of them driving around and stuff. If they were all proxies it would make working with/setting up animation/revising much less painless.

My thinking is to make everything I want to rig/animate into its own proxy (each wheel, and car body) so that in my scene I can maintain group structure with which to use in rigging. (Would have;
Chassis, LF Wheel, LF Brake, LR Wheel, LR Brake, RF Wheel, RF Brake, RR Wheel, RR Brake. Total of 9 proxies for 1 car.)

Is that stupid? Is there another better way? I have to edit stuff a lot so don't like the idea of so many separate proxies it would be best for me to have just one to deal with one but I know you can't rig objects/groups within one proxy right? (I mean without opening it)

[stezza]

I recently produced a rigged eagle made up of Panasonic products which were all proxys, some of models were up to 8 million polys each and on the final rig I had nearly 400 products making up the eagle.
It was really simple to just parent constrain them to the rig and even got them into MASH for an exploding scene.
I think the way you mentioned would be just fine!

[emartin8907]

Wow, that's a lot of proxies!!

Being able to work with MASH would also be great, nice use of that for an explosion animation. Last car explosion animation I did all by hand and was very tedious, and only like 50 parts maybe.

[smbell]

It would be cool if there the proxies were able to have attributes exported with the geo and exposed in the proxy node. Like you could set up attributes that controlled the wheel rotation and turning and then you could just hook them up to the proxy node and animate them. There could be so many uses. Changing colors or configurations of buildings etc.