Skyline INK featuring Craft 4-Wheeler Extended, Craft HumanizerCam and more

"The build time for the cars literally was only a couple hours for a project that took 6 months. It would have taken me 24 to 30 production hours without it and wouldn't have come out nearly as good:"

Brian Eyerman Skyline INK

Craft Spline Speed-Controller

This tutorial will take you through the basics of Craft Spline Speed-Controller in 3ds Max. This tutorial is also very useful for Maya users since all of the Craft-specific actions are the same in Maya.

Craft 4-Wheeler Extended

This tutorial will take you through the basics of rigging and beginning to use Craft 4-Wheeler Extended in 3ds Max. This tutorial is also very useful for Maya users since all of the Craft-specific actions are the same in Maya.

What VisCo has to say about the animation:

"VisCo is a norwegian based 3d animation company. For this animated commercial we used Craft 4-Wheeler. We saved a lot of production time using the Craft 4-wheeler plugin. We could even sit down with the customer and make changes to the animation in a matter of minutes."

Microsoft DX10 Teaser: 720p HD: This first ran at E3, announcing titles that are be created for DX10 based games. All camera animation was made using Craft ObserverCam and took less than three hours.

Bill Dahlinger, Senior Technical Director. Rezn8 Productions, Los Angeles, CA

The slightly rebuilt APC from Alien II uses Craft FirePower to drive the turret. Craft FirePower outputs a "virtual input" which is directed into the "external force" input of Craft 4WheelerExt by which the recoil of the gun is transported into the simulation making everything run simultaneously. (The "bad" suspension was added deliberately so as to properly capture the recoil)

A fully rigged motorcycle with suspension using Craft 2-Wheeler Extended, Craft Suspension (Utility), Craft ObserverCam, Craft AutoFocusCam. This took about 40 minutes for both rigging and animation. We used the LQ2HQ(TM) concept. LQ (Low-Quality) means we hid the high-poly model and drove the motorcycle with the simplest possible settings (RayMultiplier = 1). Then when the drive path was satisfactory we simply configured for higher precision, rewound the whole sequence, hit the "(Re)Simulate" button and waited for the HQ animation to run its course.

Camera work was done in three levels: one Craft ObserverCam for the basic camera flight, a second Craft ObserverCam moved in relation to this one (it was parented to the first one) and finally a Craft AutoFocusCam was parented ontop of that for real-time focus.

By Niklas Grahn at Epsilon HighTech AB www.epsilon.nu

By Henrik Morén at X-Din www.xdin.com

By Henrik Morén www.xdin.com

This film was made by Nildo Essa at FX LDA, Mocambique, www.fxlda.com

"The car animation was pretty quick; about 15 minutes. We tried using a steering wheel to control it but funny enough we found that keyboard was really the easiest way. We showed it to the client... he was so stunned at the result that he thought it was perfect as it was. We could not have done it without your plug-in. Its fun to use and it really gives great results.

"The car animations were done based on some web clips that we downloaded from a "saab" showoff...especially the part where the cop accelerates and does a 180 to get in front of the bad guy. That's really possible and not just for show as some people may think."

Onico commercial shown in Swedish television. Craft 4-Wheeler Extended was used in this film.

VizDepot raves about Craft Director Tools

"Overall, I must say that I am extremely pleased with the ease of use, helpful staff, and cost efficiency of these plug-ins. Never before have I been able to produce such a professional looking animation with such ease." (read the full review)

Test animation of a very cool bug-car made by Brazillian master of Max, Marcelo Leal using Craft 4-Wheeler Extended and Craft HumanizerCam.

10 sec from the work that we made with the Craft 4-Wheeler Extended. Optima's client was Ford Turkey and this is the new Ford Transit 2007 model.

Emre Goren, Optima Production, Istanbul, Türkiye

Visualization of Sun Microsystems X4200 Server by David Elderly, Videoinstinct LLC.

This visualization uses Craft ObserverCam and Craft SphereCam.

Testflight by Oliver Braun

XSI Fighter OPS demo reel by PerspectX using Craft Airplane Extended and Camera Tools.

(Right-click here to download XVid version)

In a joint venture with one of the animation industry's absolute top 3D modelling firms, PerspectX, Craft Animations has begun production of Craft Pre-Rigged Solutions. This clip shows tests on the rigs for a MIG29 with missiles and an EFA Fighter Jet (modelled at PerspectX) using Craft Airplane Extended and Craft Missile, and a number of Craft Camera Tools.

Rigging took about forty minutes and all animation, cameras and objects (except particle effects) took slightly less than 2 hours to create. The EFA actually follows an invisible airplane that was flown through the canyon first. The EFA was set to follow this invisible ariplane and the MIG29 was then set to automatically follow the EFA. Both Airplanes could be animated in relation to automatic path in real-time to create rolls and quicker reactions. The missiles were all fired manually at the right moment along the path.

The missiles were configured to have weak guidance strength except for the last shot which hit the EFA.

(We can rig any model you have so that you can control all moving parts in real time: contact Craft Animations directly).

The clip shows a Craft 4-Wheeler Extended with "Car with Jump Settings" as a preset, in combination with a physics engine (reactor or maya dynamics). All animation (except particle effects and reactor physics) took about 1 hour to create, cameras included.

During the burnout (created with Craft 4-Wheeler Extended) four ragdolls are run over by making the car body a passive dynamics body (deformable mesh in Max). For filming we used Craft SphereCam with its center-mesh attached to the chassis as a base. To make the camera movements more interesting we added two more motion hierarchy layers. The first extra layer is a Craft ObserverCam (on top of the SphereCam) which adds some minor adjustments. The top most layer (on top of the ObserverCam) is a Craft HumanizerCam with the "Fast Lateral Movement" preset chosen to add a hand held live action feeling to the shot. Finally the clip was rendered at 60fps but compressed at 30fps yielding a 50% slow-motion giving the final result some extra mass. In total all animations took 5 hours to complete (cameras, particle effects and ragdoll physics included).

Here a Craft 4-Wheeler has been rigged on to the corvette ship with the car body scaled so that the wheels are almost at the very front and rear of the boat and then moved inwards to touch the hull of the boat. The fluid rocking of the boat was accomplished by setting the suspension stiffness to 2000 and suspension dampening to 100. The turn center was set to 0.6 which means that the boat turned around it's midpoint. The Skidding Offset was set to 1.0 and Skidding Maximum set at 0.98. The rigging took about 10 minutes and the animation about 25 minutes. Finally the clip was rendered at 60fps and compressed at 30fps to give the ship more weight and therefore appear to be larger.

At each of the WheelBottomMeshes a particle source is attached slightly above ground level, pointed downwards and outputing instances of a rectangular mesh with the same width as the tire. The particles are outputed with zero velocity to stick to the ground. The instance must be turned when output to match the orientation of the particle source (which is why a small BirthScript is needed in max, see below). 4 particles are outputed per frame. To make a softer edge the rectangular meshes should also be made transparent with a gradient at the edges. Even though the ground is not flat in the clip, with the current version this tire track technique works best on flat surfaces. BirthScript (max):TireTracks

The tutorials below are not up-to-date but can be used as a means to understand the workflow.