I'm working on a procedural dirtbike rear tire, it's my goal to create it in a way it's Highly customizeble as a digital asset. I got pretty far allready, I've got the nops number/layers of detail/ect setup done but I'm struggling on the deform part. Having more or less air pressure in the tire, my plan has been basically having a deformer/translate on the tire that fakes the effect. But I just can't get the desired result.

If the air pressure drops or a heavy load is added the tire get's more or less flat, because the rubber needs to stay somewhere the tire pulls out to the side. (In case of dirt bike, landing Big jump also add a lot additional mass to the wheels for a very short time).

Some how I just can't get it done using the availible deformer nodes in Houdini.

Any suggestions?

Check this example out, I think it should still work. I created it awhile ago.
It was meant to demonstrate how you could use bones to deform geometry that was rotating within its capture field.

This OTL might help or at least by studying it you might get some ideas: http://www.sidefx.com/exchange/info.php?fileid=93&versionid=93 [sidefx.com]

Dragos

I have a point lattice based tire deformer I am using for a CG car spot. It allows for specific sculpting of the shape of the tire deformation as well as procedural ground contact.

I like Peter's capture/deform approach too. I used a series of softtransform sops to shape the lattice cage, but even more specific control of the shape could be done using this capture/deform method on the cage and painting the weights with a capturelayerpaint sop.

I'm truly impressed, I'm a former Maya guy and kind of ussed to the cgtalk.com respons kind. Normaly most of it isn't very helpfull or vage, at least it sallows by the quality of your responses ;-).
Thanks a lot, I did expect something but I didn't expect this much :-).

I do got some result on the melt SOP, witch commes close to the result I got in mind.

But altho I don't know anything about it yet, ‘nobodyinparticular’s' idea of using the ‘capturelayerpaint sop’ sounds very promissing. I think its the exact amount of control I'm looking for.

@ ‘nobodyinparticular’:
Can you give me an briefly introduction in how your setup works, because I can't discover how to control it at al.



The setup I got so far does work but the main problem lies in the nop's (the grip profile things on the tire) are deformed to in a way I do not really like. This tire according to the nop's is build using a tire shape and duplicated nops. I got 3 differend nops and they got duplicated using several duplicate and transform nodes.
As shown below:

Basic tire shape:


Tire + nops


Deformed tire


Deformed tire + nops (There is a smooth SOP down de line, please ignore that part ;-)


Based on the lessons I've seen at 3dbuzz I think the best way to solve this is let the nop's follow the deforming tire without deforming them selve.
I can imagine a way to do this is distribute points on the tire surfase witch can be used to instance/copy particle what ever the nop's, but in a way the profile scheme keeps in place. Would be wonderfull if we could easly adjust these this scheme as my goal has been to create a easy highly customiseble digital asset.
Minnor point off intressed, I have no cluw how to accomplish this ;-)

Any suggestions?

Here's an example file where a base tire carcas is lattice deformed. Then a modelled knobby tire tread is crept on the base carcas.

The actual latice deformer is quite s**ty so look a the other files for that.


I built up this little system such that the tire is animated in world space at the object level and the ground terrain is object merged in. The lattice is rayed down on to the grid. Note to lift the grid up the thickness of the knobbies in actual practice inside the tire object.

The idea is to always have your rigged bits at the world level but smarts built inside. I learned this from the master of how to rig anything: nobodyinparticular.

jeff
The idea is to always have your rigged bits at the world level but smarts built inside. I learned this from the master of how to rig anything: nobodyinparticular.

Dear God Jeff…. Do you have any idea what this will do to his head?

*closes the blast doors*

Wolfwood
Dear God Jeff…. Do you have any idea what this will do to his head?

*closes the blast doors*

yay! self esteem cookies for me!
(thanks Jeff)

hey Nerox,
The tire setup I sent was stripped out of a complete car, so there is some extra complexity I needed for my specific car setup, and also I may have left a few unused extra parts around that might be distracting you. All I can suggest is that you look at the setup using the network editor and follow the connections carefully to try to figure it out, and if you have specific questions I will do my best to answer them. I sent the example file to avoid having to type a long explanation, since my typing skills suck.

Wolfwood

jeff
The idea is to always have your rigged bits at the world level but smarts built inside. I learned this from the master of how to rig anything: nobodyinparticular.

Dear God Jeff…. Do you have any idea what this will do to his head?

*closes the blast doors*

Ghehe, indeed. I do understand the principals behind it, but it will take a little while before I'll be able to use this in a properway.

@ Jeff: thanks any way ;-)

@ Jeff:
I like your method of deforming but it still deforms the nop's pretty heavily, where a dirtbike racing tire is very stiff.

I would like to achieve a workflow (This tire is just a test/study case) where I'll be able to , with some decent preparation, sit down whit a director or creative and fine tune the simulation/animation what ever till it fits his vision or idea.

In this case I think I should go for a paint able/procedural ground contact deformation method. Probably like Nobodyinparticular's approach,

@ nobodyinparticular:
Why do you use so many softxform deformers? instead of 1 or 2?.

Nerox
@ nobodyinparticular:
Why do you use so many softxform deformers? instead of 1 or 2?.

It just evolved that way. The only purpose they serve is to give the proper shape to the bulge. In hindsight, I could have driven a single sculpted blendshape or a weight-painted deform just as easily.