Cinematic Car Rig

A blueprint for animating cars on spline paths directly in the sequencer with functionalities required in cinematic renderings.

Why You Need This

• If you are an automotive artist, you probably know that animating cars using chaos vehicles or other physics-based vehicle systems and recording your driving using the take recorder is not the best thing that has ever happened to you

• Let's be honest, we all are obsessed with drifting, but making perfect turns with these systems is almost impossible even if you record your driving in slow motion, and on top of that, when you’re done recording, that’s it! Even minor edits are off the table and you need to record again but think about that almost successful turn you made in the previous take! Time to chop off the takes!

• Animating in your DCC app is a whole other story that I don’t even get started with but you probably know that you won’t get the real feeling of the environment when you do the animating there and also for any edits, you have to go back and forth from one app to another

• Now that I have your attention, Cinematic Car Rig is a blueprint system designed exclusively for car animators

What You Will Get

• You can use custom static meshes for the body, wheels, calipers, and steering wheel

• Attach anything you want to these components and be able to configure modular or blueprint car bodies

• Wheels can trace ground and stick to it either locally or vertically

• This rig has a spring system without using physics and you can set up dynamic suspension parts

• Add as many wheels as you want

• You can visualize everything in the editor and the sequencer, no simulation is needed

• Wheels trace complex collision and any mesh or actor can be excluded from the tracing

• Body controllers to key their transform instead of four parameters

• Scalable car and wheels without importing the meshes

• Keyable drift angle with automated chassis leaning

• Keyable and separate front and rear wheel camber

• Keyable body roll, pitch, and height

• Keyable front and rear burnouts

• The ability to bake and export the animation of the car to be used on external software like Houdini or EmberGen

Spline Blueprint

• This system includes a spline path blueprint that the car can follow

• Realistic path navigation along the spline

• Automatic steering along the spline

• Snap spline points to the ground with a click

• Reverse spline path direction with a click

• The car starts over from the start, if the distance traveled is greater than the length of the path

• Close the spline with a click and make a circuit track

Current version 2.1

Technical Details

Features:

• Spline path following

• Wheels tracing

• Unlimited number of wheels

• Spring system

• Dynamic suspension parts

• Calipers system

• Working steering wheel

• Automatic slope aligning

• Automatic chassis leaning on steering and drifting

• Automatic wheel rotation

• Automatic steering along the path

• Drifting angle

• Body controllers

• Front and rear burnout

• Front and rear wheel camber

• Zero physics used

• Editor preview

• Non-random body and wheel vibration

• Path blueprint

• Jump ramp blueprint

• Animation baking and exporting

Number of Blueprints: 5

Input: N/A

Network Replicated: No

Supported Development Platforms:

Windows: Yes

Mac: Yes

Documentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iNBOzRhqjuL7BMK_xN61VxEiIX0qDNh-0iywkss10zE/present#slide=id.p1

Important Note: This blueprint system is solely developed for animation and offline rendering workflows with the "Movie Render" pipeline. It is not optimized in any way for use in games. If you want to use it in your game, please do it on your responsibility.