I have some rigged cars and other wheeled vehicles in Blender. I want to know if there’s a way to animate them so they automatically vary their movement and altitude as they travel over terrain (such as one with hills). I think that the game physics engine may have a use but as the models become complex the game engine takes ages to make anything happen. Anyone know a way to make a vehicle react naturally to its environment?
not at the moment, there are vehicle templates that you can download, and they are pretty damn good(google blender regerssion suite). But there is no single ‘make vehicle physics’ button in blender yet 
Philippe Roubal described a method for making cars react somewhat realistically in this thread. It’s curve-based, so doesn’t allow to automatically follow an arbitrary terrain. However he has clever ways of dealing with the tilt of the body in turns, matching wheel rotation to travel, and even the flattening of the tires with the weight of the vehicle.
I see this thread only today, and it may be too late,but I did several rigs for cars, and the most recents follow perfectly any kind of terrain. So just go in the Blender section of my website and try the different setups. Full PDF tutorial provided.
Hi Roubal… have you done anything towards converting to 2.5x? Great work on the car rigs… have used it for a 57chevy rig… also added a particle system exhaust… but like most of my 2.49b work … it don’t work without some work … ho hum.
How about this car setup for the game engine?
http://blog.mikepan.com/blender-vehicle-physics-tutorial/
@batFINGER : I’m sorry, but I have not yet switched to 2.5x. I’m waiting for stable 2.6 release. I have not much time and I don’t want to study things that still can evolve.
As they use mainly empties, parenting and constraints, my 2.49 systems should work in 2.5x, I think… or with simple modifications if they don’t directly.
My only worry is about the self tracking feature using dependencies, I don’t know how it will be handled in 2.5x.
@ROUBAL understand you waiting for 2.6…Been playing with converting your rig to 2.54b (fingers crossed it doesn’t change too much) …getting my head around converting the wheel rotation script is my major hassle.