archived projects

Back in 2002, working at an accident reconstruction firm, I got more interested in some aspects of vehicle dynamics and behavior. I spent some time with George Barjoud's "Vehicle Simulator" plugin for Max. A very nice program which unfortunately vanished along with George in the mid 2000's. Well, at least you couldn't run it (required an auth code) after Max 2006 and his business "New Plugins" disappeared along with any ability to contact him. Certainly a niche market which likely didn't pay enough to compensate for what must have been a lot of work. Around this time I had bought the REM Infographica model library which was being sold for about $500 if I recall. An absolute bargain back then for a collection consisting of many thousands of models at multiple resolutions. I also had these different schemes for creating tire tracks and so I made this little test scene using the REM Hummer model and the Vehicle Simulator plugin. My tire track system at this time might have been a particle system spraying out a plane object at the location of each tire using a "Conform" Space Warp keeping the plane flat to the ground surface. It was of course inspired by the old MaxTrax plugin which had a similar workflow. I tried a few other methods for creating tire tracks back then so I'm actually not sure which this is. Of course I had to throw in some particle effects, though I obviously had a lot to learn. And to honest, Max's particle systems needed some growth too.