monster truck animation

as the truck is on a mud/dust part of the arena i thought it would add a level of realism to the animation i would have a dust trail coming from the tires. unfortuantly i dont have any screen shots of this process but i have some of the final product.

i started by creating a plane that was slightly longer thant he width of the outer side of the 2 tires on each axel, it hen aligned it to the middle of the tires and moved it backwards until it was in the correct place for where the dust would start to emulate. lastly i rotated the plane to enable the particles to travel upwards slightly.


i then linked each plane (front & rear) to their respective wheels via one of the wheel hubs.

i then created a PArray to control the creation, growth and speed of the emitted particals.
i havnt started them imediatly as the truck doesnt start moving straight away, but i started it as the body tilts up to create an effect of the truck doing a wheelspin. i also set the life of the particles to 25 so just short of a second. lastly the particles stop emiting as the truck gets on to the straight.

as the terrain isnt too dusty, more muddy i put the size of the particles small.

the last stage was to add a material to the particles, i tried to get a dark brown colour to match the ground so it looked more like mud than dust, but due to the gradient and noise mask to produce the transparent areas it still looked a lot like dust.

Final Product.