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MSFS Animated Ground Traffic - PathFollow Animation Object

Christian Bahr

Christian Bahr

Resource contributor
Messages
994
Country
germany
Hi!

I am currently in the process of creating animated ground traffic for the Dortmund Airport project. Something occurred to me and I asked myself whether it was recently possible to use the MSFS SDK to program ground vehicles so that they collide with other objects. And so I then placed an Asobo collision material over the vehicles. The effect is that the ground vehicles collide with my plane as you can see here:



I find this a very interesting approach, let's see what we can develop from it :wizard:
Asobo, you keep surprising us anew 🙂
 
Christian, could you explain how to set an animated scenery object to follow the path? Do you export the path as part of the object following it? And how do you determine the speed at which the objects travels along the path?
Thanks and cheers, Fabian
 
Hi Fabian.

The setup is very easy to do. I have just recorded a short video in 3dsm that shows the entire animation creation process.


First you open a vehicle
Then you create a path, for example with the Line Tool
A Path Contrains Controller is assigned to the vehicle
Then a path is assigned to the object and the necessary settings are made
The speed of the vehicle is determined by the length of the animation
Finally, the animation is broken down to transfer the keys to the vehicle

Here you can download the video directly: 3dsm_path_follow_object_animation
 
Last edited:
Hi,
From what I understand here, you created a path in 3dsmax to animate the ground vehicle, but is it possible to achieve a similar result with Living World? I tried making an animated ground vehicle in Blender, and the animation itself works fine in sim. But when I try to use Living World to instance the vehicle as part of ambient traffic, the vehicle doesn't seem to be spawning.
 
What I need to try now is to put a collision material around my airplane and see if ground traffic stops just driving through my aircraft :)
 
Christian Bahr said:
@fabs79
Hi Fabian, how does it look. Can you give us feedback?
Click to expand...
Sorry Christian, I'd love to try it out but at the moment my time for developing is pretty limited because my colleagues and I were drafted for doing extra shifts on our Covid ICU to support the staff there. The few hours I have for simming each month I spend flying the just flight PA28 and correcting some bugs in my previous NFTO scenery at the moment, but I'll get back to my NZKI scenery as soon as I have the time. Looking forward to your scenery in the meantime!
 
OK, I took some minutes to create a path for my object to follow, and it works well in Blender, but I have problems exporting it because the fspackagetool gives me an xml compile error; could you please post the xml of your animated object so I could compare it with mine? Thanks again for your help!
 
Can you please post your XML file or its content here, please. Maybe we will find the mistake together :)
 
Hi Christian, here is my test setup with a simple cube that follows a path:
Screenshot (13).png


My export settings:

1621536205076.png



And the xml file contents:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<ModelInfo guid="{af78acde-fe42-40aa-696d-db92dc810929}" version="1.1"/>
<Animation name="cube" guid="06213db5-231a-454e-bded-08752a0b87d9" type = "Standard" typeParam="Autoplay" />
</ModelInfo>



I have to admit that I know absolutely NOTHING about how these xml files work, I just copied and pasted the settings from the tutorial for animated objects by FlyingTheston on Youtube.

Thanks again,

Fabian
 
The code seems incomplete, see if it works with this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<ModelInfo version="1.1" guid="{7360498b-9488-4855-93e5-d019d1d1e87f}">
<Animation name="cube" guid="3ad39975-2664-4039-8f86-1ed0a92657f1" type="Standard" typeParam="AutoPlay,Random" />
</ModelInfo>

Please use the entire code, including the GUID'S.
 
Christian Bahr said:
The code seems incomplete, see if it works with this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<ModelInfo version="1.1" guid="{7360498b-9488-4855-93e5-d019d1d1e87f}">
<Animation name="cube" guid="3ad39975-2664-4039-8f86-1ed0a92657f1" type="Standard" typeParam="AutoPlay,Random" />
</ModelInfo>

Please use the entire code, including the GUID'S.
Click to expand...
Just wondering, what does "Random" do in this code? :)
 
This means that the animation starts at random points along the path. So the animation should not always play at the beginning of the path.
 
OK, the good news is that the xml compiles without an error message now. The bad news is that the animation doesn´t play, the cube just sits still in midair and doesn't move an inch. In Blender the animation plays without issues, so I must be doing something wrong during the export process.
 
pyreegue said:
Click to expand...
Thanks for posting, I watched the tutorial a few weeks ago but had the impression that a path follow animation would be different than what was shown in the video. Nevertheless, yesterday I succeeded. My mistake was that I chose the object name as the animation name, but the animation name seems to be the name of the NLA track which still hat its default name "NLAtrack" after naming the NLA track "cube" the animation played successfully.
 
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