Animating The Building Of A Car

In this tutorial we'll explain how to do an interesting effect creating a car.

The Principal

We're going to animate a car assembling itself in two different ways;1. Building a car, polygon by polygon. 2. This effect will make it look like the car was assembled by picking up mirrors on the floor.

Building A Car - Poygon By Polygon

For this tutorial we'll take advantage of the capability to animate attributes. The attributes are going to be animating merge vertix attributes. We're going to merge all the vertices and then un-merge them. It's important through this tutorial not to delete history.

Step one - Download the car and open it in Maya.

Step two - Select all the objects except the wheels and tires.

Step three - Go to mesh>combine.

Step four - This is the only time in this tutorial that you'll want to delete history.

Step five - Now go to edit mesh>merge.

Step six - Open the attributes editor (window>attributes editor).

Step seven - Find the tab polyMergeVert1. Set the distance to 2. All that'll be left are two triangles because it merged the other vertices.

Step eight - Set the timeline to 150 frames. You can change how many frames you use. The more frames you have, the longer the animation.

Step nine - In the attributes editor, right click on the value and click set key. Make sure this is on frame 1.

Step ten - Go to frame 150.

Step eleven - Now set the distance attribute to 0. Right click on the value and set a key. Play the animation. As it plays it'll assemble the car.