An Idea I've had for awhile.

[BowtieBandit]

And I'm sure im not the first

but, as many of you know many monster truck races at fairgrounds, like many of my tracks, are held during county fairs, and there are many rides seen in the background.

I was thinking of making some flat, 2D animated ferris wheels, fireballs and whatever else you could think of to sit on the other side of a fence, low lag, taking up space and ultimately having fewer verts than lining the fences with trees like I usually do.

And even at night, we could have lighted up animated rides to help give it that county fair look all the much more.

How could we animate them and now make htem look very choppy and rough? Im no model maker, but I'm asking those pros out there for some help with this idea of mine, I wanna see how possible it is.

[Phineus]

This is very possible to do and sounds like a fun idea. When using flat 2D bins, you create the animation strictly in the textures. Think of it like those old diagram books where you flip the pages and each drawing is slightly different from the one before it and so it creates the illusion of motion. Same thing in our game. The number of 'diagrams' you need will vary depending on what you are animatinng. If a ferris wheel has four 'spokes' in the middle, crossed at ninety degrees, you might only need three or four textures since you don't have to create a full circle but only a quarter of it. I think the fastest and clearest way for you to get the idea, if you don't already have it, would just be to disassemble any of the models here. There are several good examples.

http://cownap.com/~mtmg/models/Custom/canimate.html

The concept is pretty basic and you should have no trouble picking up on it.

On the other hand, you can also create animations using models. This can give the smoothest effect in the game since it will morph between frames. Which method you use will depend what you're making. Obviously some models are more suited to 2D and others require a more 3D shape. All of them, however, will need a bit of binedit work.... which there is plenty of help and assistance around here when you need it.

[BowtieBandit]

only real problem i would see is if say these props were set to your left facing opposite the grandstands or soemthing and you were on the end of the track, and you could see that they were props by being able to see the backsdies or whatever, dont know how to word that jsut right

now i think you could put it on facing but i dunno how realistic that would be

maybe some extreme low-lag 3d models would work for the ferris wheels and such

anyone? comments? suggestions? offers to help?

[Phineus]

You should be able to use something like the fly/chicago/misc ferris wheel and animate it.

<center><img src="http://cownap.com/~mtmg/models/Fly/flypics/chferr1.jpg" width="200"></center>


For 2D items where you're concerned about appearances, you might be able to put them between and slightly behind a couple trees so you get a more 'crowded' effect. In the distance it might not look so bad. I think the best example, that everybody knows, is the 2D flames that Guitar Bill made. When those are set to facing, they usually look all right. Sure, in some circumstances they're not perfect, but most times they're okay.

For 3D, there's the rex in c98. You wouldn't want to over crowd a track with them, but a few wouldn't hurt. For the ferris wheel above, we could probably make a few that spin at different speeds, or opposite directions, using the same basic parts. That would cut down some lag, for sure. I haven't taken apart the ferris wheel, but if there is too many verticies, then maybe we could use tire maker and create something with less points.