After a looong time of struggling I finished a little project of mine: A new Car Rig that is STABLE and easy to work with.
When doing car animations I often went back to the good old “Rig-a-Car” because of its stability and userfriendlyness, but it was in many ways too basic for good car animations.
Until… Launch Control!
(I guess…)
The story begins over a year ago when my friend over at ClassyDogFilms asked me to help him develop a good car rig for a film he is working on. I realized that if we made the rig ourselves we could fix a lot of the problems we experience with the current solutions out there, so that was what we did.
With time the tool got more and more polished and now I want to share it with all of you. I hope the tool will help you a lot and encourage you to do even more epic car animations in Blender!
On this page I wanted to share some of the visuals I have been working on while developing the rig. Some are better than others, heh - But what makes me the most happy is that I enjoy rigging and animating cars now. Anyways… Hope you’ll enjoy the content!
This tool looks so good! Question for you: is it possible to animate the a car tilting up on two wheels with this? Trying to find a good solution to handle something like this
Well, I gotta say that even though can do that, it would not be the ideal rig for this particular action.
You could use the ground detection and then animate two cubes on either side of the van being pushed up. The physics should take care of the little sweet wobble in the end. ^^
You also have a custom weight controller that can make the car jump and cartoon-ishly wobble.
But Launch Control really shines when you want to animate cars driving - cartoon cars, real cars, RC cars and anything like that. So it’s more aimed for that kind of animations, rather than cars jumping around and being cute.
Hello!! That is awesome to hear, thanks!
Well, I am sorry about that. I believe it’s because I accidentally uploaded it with the left stereo channel muted That might be messing it up for you.
YouTube doesn’t let you adjust such things after the fact. The other tutorial (and future ones) should NOT have this problem!!
Oh no problem, that would explain it, my headphones are missing the left ear. I guess the rest of the world can hear it just fine. Looks like a great rig. Have a good day.
I don’t know, I think its pretty rare to have a headphone with one side missing. I broke the headphones and haven’t replaced them. Yeah, though, it is a big world.
Hello Daniel, I just bought your add on, and what I was really interested in is how to get some of the smoke and rubber burning effects that I see in your videos. Could you make a tutorial on that? It would be awesome if a future version of your add on would enabl such a functionality automatically or in a user triggered form. Thank you.
Thank you for the support! - Yeah, I plan on making something like this using simulation nodes and particles. What you see in the video is a volume simulation, so it is something like 100 GB of data and took 20h to simulate for this tiny shot - in other words, it’s not so practical.
However! For the latest short film I made I was testing out an approach using particles - similar to what I imagine will be built into LC at some point, but done with the old particle systems.
I have a little example file here you can try out - Maybe you can use the setup for something.
Thank you. For are you using to populate the cards? Wondering if you have an image or something that you typically use? Is it something I can find online?
That might be messing it up for you.