I've finally created my very first steering animation! It works in game!
— open
Driver Rig_Version1.7_2015.max file with the driver animation (modded version) in 3DS Max.
— import the seat and the steering wheel from the car you're working on.
— move your car steering wheel (+seat) to the driver position
— move the car steering wheel into
Wheel Main>Point001>Wheel Guide, so the steering wheel will move accordingly to the animation.
— select the parent dummy related to the steering wheel
Wheel Main and adjust the size, distance and rotation.
— once the dummy steering wheel is perfectly aligned with your car steering wheel, play the animation.
— if you need to adjust the fingers, along the animation, to avoid them to penetrate the steering wheel, you can do it easily adjusting the bones.
— select only the parent
DRIVER:RIVER and export selected the driver animation as
steer.fbx**
** when you save the animation, don't forget to tick ANIMATION and BAKE the animation with 200 frames.
All the frames beyond 200 are reserved to the manual shifting animation.
— Import the car you're working on.
— hide everything but the seat and the wheel.
— import the
steer.fbx file, containing the driver animation (200 frames total).
— move the driver towards the correct position of the seat and the steering wheel.
— now play the timeline with the animation and you see it's correct (the wheel doesn't rotate yet)
— select only the driver animation parent dummy (it will select all the tree) and export selected.
— save it as
steer.fbx**
— delete the driver selecting the parent dummy and export the car.
** when you save the animation, don't forget to tick ANIMATION
— Open Kunos editor
— open
steer.fbx and save Driver Base Pos as
driver_base_pos.knh
— open animation
steer.fbx and it will automatically create the file
steer.ksanim
— now restart the editor, open the car and save it, in case you did make changes.
— the file
driver_base_pos.knh must be placed in your car folder
— the file
steer.ksanim must be placed in
animations folder
— we didn't create any shift animation, but it's enough you grab a shift_up/dw and car_shift_up/dw.ksanim from the car with similar shifting
**driver3d.ini
[STEER_ANIMATION]
NAME=steer.ksanim
LOCK=360
Check this line, in case the animation appears not as good as your attempt on 3DS Max.
slowmotion to appreciate better the animation.
That's all, folks.
Now check with Content Manager, load the driver and move the steering bar.
I hope this tutorial can be useful for many, so for all the modded cars with a broken steering animation we can easily fix it.
I think this method it's even easier, a lot easier, than the one where you import the
drive_base.fbx file from the Kunos example.
Why? Because the fbx file is already fixed for a certain car, therefore it would require hell of an hard work the fix every single frame, because when you apply a small movement to the forehand, arm, or even finger, you risk to mess up the remaining frames, as the hand will change position according to your previous change.
Opening the 3DS Max file, instead, makes you fix the steering wheel animation to its core, basing on your car steering wheel.
