Years after years since the old Bullet Physics Toolbox Controller, iClone has dramatically developed but without any new car animation system.
This is something we can’t do with iClone, we must export everything to third party software like Blender to animate cars.
Do you think iClone will have this feature or Reallusion is more concentrating in making iClone/CC functionality available for other software like Blender and Unreal as we saw huge pipelines and plugin between IC/CC and UE and Blender.
Mostly that IC user can benefit from these software in Rendering/Car Rigging… etc without IC able to do that?!.
Well, there are different ways to “animate” or “simulate” vehicles:
a) Via key-framing controllers; the car can be animated along a spline/path with the wheel automatically rotating, but over-/understeering, car body motions, etc. need to be animated by hand.
b) Via physics simulation, ideally with ground collision detection, different friction for the various surface types (e.g. dry asphalt vs. ice), with (automatic) under- and oversteering, suspension, FWD, RWD, 4WD, etc.
c) “Real” simulation based on actual car parameters combined with physics, such as physical dimensions, engine performance (torque, etc.), gearbox ratios, weight, suspension settings, etc.
All these approaches have their pros and cons; in my experience, the more physics you have, the less predictable the simulation will be, the longer it will take to get the look you want, and the more difficult problem solving becomes, if things don’t work out.
Also, an auto-rigger for car models might be very helpful. And motorcycles would be another issue.
Now, as for iClone, I would not expect to see much improvement over the current system because more/better simulation capabilities might harm “real time” performance, and, possibly, require a more extensive overhaul of the physics system.
I looks to me as if RL is primarily focused on the character creation and animation side of things and not trying to be a one-stop solution for any type of animation needs.
As was discussed in the iClone render engine thread, I would assume that the developmental resources that RL has at its disposal are somewhat more limited than those of other 3DCC program makers. Also, it seems to me that there is not such a thriving community of third-party plug-in developers for iClone as there appears to be for, say, Blender.
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@Nirwana thank you so much for this informative reply, alot of technical points in it.
Regarding simulation and animation of the vehicles, we only want a simple animation or rig for the steering and tyre spinning, not those complicated gear box stuff and other automotive simulation.
We hope at least there will be a Python plugin or the legacy toolbox can be converted from Bullet to Physics system.
The only workaround available for now is this:
https://youtu.be/LslIvy0aKHQ
I haven’t done much with vehicles lately; I did a couple of tests in C4D about 4 years ago, which are partially based on C4D physics (the “old” system) and partially on something I rigged (somewhat similar to what I outlined in (b) above). The car roughly follows a spline/path; there are very few keyframes if I remember correctly; everything the car does (steering, wheels turning/spinning on the ice, oversteering, suspension, etc.) is simulated.
This is the RWD version (there is also a version with 4WD on my channel):
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Obviously developing for Blender requires only your programming knowledge and a mid range PC to run and test your addons.
the same is true for the vast multitude
of third party Daz studio utilities
People not already invested in the Reallusion eco system are likely put off by the high initial buy-in costs
so I personally doubt there will ever be a thriving third partly python plugin market for Iclone /CC4.
Here is something you can try.
It is not set up with suspension, and meant for on-road. It does steer and roll properly. Rig download is in the description.
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Hi,
Since I’m not knowledgeable about the more advanced stuff in iClone, I was just curious if is possible to set up a car rig in iClone that could do what the car in the video I linked above does. Also I remember seeing some kind of physics toolbox in the Content Store that included “motors” and other vehicle related stuff, but I think this was a legacy asset. Would that still work in iClone 8 and perhaps be helpful to @Mana.Lucine ?
@Rampa you are the champion of IC users who help and create real solutions for something that couldn’t be possible in IC. This is outstanding and truly helpful.
Hi @Nirwana i tried the legacy toolbox but it is buggy and uses bullet engine which prevent cloth simulation. If you want to use it in a scence you will be facing a lot of difficulty in switch in physic engines as well as ‘recording’ car simulation.
That may be. But a physics-based vehicle simulation would require, as far as I know, the bullet engine. So you would have to bake that, and then switch engines for any cloth simulation in the scene and bake that separately.
It is a bit much to ask the bullet engine to do cloth simulation or the soft-cloth engine to do vehicles sims. Different simulations usually need different engines.
And, as far as I’m aware, that is also the case in other 3D software (C4D’s unified physics engine might possibly do this but I have not yet tried to combine vehicle and cloth simulation in the same scene). I did those vehicle sims in C4D some time before I thought of doing cloth simulations in that program.
Rigid Body(bullet)
Cloth and ragdoll Physics
in the same simulation.
I did this animation 14 years ago
with the python based Physic plugin for Poser.
The creator abandoned the project years ago but released it as OPEN SOURCE after updating it for python 3.
I still keep a copy of the (otherwise useless), Poser software installed
just for the ragdoll engine as I used it to create this commercial Daz Genesis product for my store over at Renderhub
I have already suggested that Reallusion
try to port this FREE OPEN SOURCE Python engine to Iclone.
Even if you could not do the cloth
just Ragdoll interaction with rigid bodies in Iclone would be an improvement.
Cascadure recently added this feature to their paid version and proudly boasts as though it is some new innovation…again
I was doing this 14 years ago.
In the same scene yes, but not in the same engine or am I missing something; aren’t there in fact three “engines”: (1) bullet, (2) the one for soft-cloth and (3) the python script for the ragdoll physics? The engines may be interacting, but the bullet engine is not doing the soft-cloth sim, is it?
Besides, I said “as far as I’m aware”: I have never used Poser, or any python script, or ragdoll physics. 
And before I discovered iClone 7, I did very little if anything with characters either (if it weren’t for iClone, I probably still would not do characters).
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In the same scene yes, but not in the same engine or am I missing something; aren’t there in fact three “engines”: (1) bullet, (2) the one for soft-cloth and (3) the python script for the ragdoll physics? The engines may be interacting, but the bullet engine is not doing the soft-cloth sim, is it?
Yes you are correct
the python based engine is solving both the the bullet physics and the ragdoll
but the cloth simulation is handled by a separate cloth engine that interacts with the bullet and ragdoll.
Besides, I said “as far as I’m aware”: I have never used Poser, or any python script, or ragdoll physics.
I was a C4D user since version 7 in the early 2000’s( ahhhh! the memories)
During the R9,10,11 years there was an amazing C4D plugin by a single developer called “interposer Pro”
Tim Vining was also a big user of the plugin for his “Star Trek Aurora” fan film.
It only supported the Native Poser figures but it was truly a complete Character solution, at that time, for C4D because it connected directly to your poser content “Runtime” libraries and loaded poser figures props and animations with no need to EXPORT TO FBX,
with the same ease that we load our Iclone content today.
That was how I got animated people into C4D back then,
The poser dudes obviously looked horrible by todays standards but we had few animated Character options for C4D back then.
(rendered in Maxon C4D R11.5)
Back then (R10, etc.), I wasn’t even considering character animation and I had never heard of this plug-in before today.
As I said, I never used Poser, hence a plug-in to integrate Poser assets into C4D would not have meant anything to me. My first attempt at using “characters” was some Adobe program whose name I don’t remember (sort of a little brother of CC) and Mixamo animations a little more than five years ago:
My animations before that did not feature (humanoid) characters.
EDIT:
The Adobe program was Fuse.
TBH unless you were in the old Poser
Ecosystem back then you probably would not have heard of it as it was quite niche
and to this day the general C4D community is mostly populated by Motion Graphics Artists not Character animators.
I remember the Adobe Fuse Characters,
they seemed like an interesting option
for use with Mixamo but alas they EOL’d it in 2021.
I guess so. I’m not really involved in the C4D community (no forums or discord channel that I go to); for tutorials for C4D I go to YouTube (the official Maxon channels and a few others).
Yeah, Fuse was not too bad considering that the software and the assets that came with it were free. (I was not really aware of DAZ Studio at the time; still don’t use that.)
When Adobe gave up on Fuse, I started to look at iClone/CC instead.