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 simply 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
• This rig has a spring system without using physics and you can set up dynamic suspension parts
• 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 tracing
• Body controllers to key their transform instead of four parameters
• Key-able drift angle with automated chassis leaning
• Key-able and separate front and rear wheels camber
• Key-able body roll, pitch, and height

Spline Blueprint

• This system includes a spline path blueprint that the car can follow
• Wheels automatically rotate based on the distance traveled on 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 goes back to the start, if the distance traveled is greater than the length of the spline path
• Close the spline with a click and make a circuit track

Demo Content

• A demo car and a demo skateboard mesh and rigs have been included in the pack to demonstrate the system capabilities

Technical Details

Features:

• Spline path following
• Wheels trace ground
• 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 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

Number of Blueprints: 5

Input: N/A

Network Replicated: No

Supported Development Platforms:

Windows: Yes

Mac: Not Tested

Documentation

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