In this Blender 2.5 video tutorial we take a very basic car model and rig the wheels to roll automatically with the car and also setup a steering system to easily point the front wheels appropriately. This simple rig makes use of several different constraint types, including transformation and track-to constraints.
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32 Responses to “Rigging Automatic Car Wheels”Leave a Comment
Why not just parent the wheels and body to the bones?
@Jonathan Williamson
can you on a future tutorial talk about using the bge to control car and record all
the physics. I posted a blend file on blendswap tanksofttrack and AUTOCARBGE101
i get the impression that everyone but me already knew that this could be done and that its cheating to use the game engine .
could you check them out and tell me what you think
I was a paid member of this site but cancelled my subscription due to the amount of unfinished ‘exclusive’ tutorials. I really would love to learn how to auto rig a car but the amount of mistakes in this tutorial that could have been edited out and, sorry Jonathan but, the amount of times you say ‘go ahead and’ is off-putting (and that’s putting in politely).
What happened to the mechanic? Did that ever reach a conclusion?
Please don’t take this the wrong way. I don’t normally criticise like this but these tutorials are becoming unwatchable for me.
If you get that bent out of shape over a few extra vertex groups and armature modifiers you should take a break (being polite here).
Excellent, this was useful training in using bones with something else than a character, and with various constraints.
could you make the base head mesh avaliable to people who dont have the money to get a account because i dont get alot of money and i want the base head mesh but i cant download it
Oh Come on its basically a box that you could make in under 2 minutes, just trace the side view and extrude it
It’s an older cookie, but it includes the entire body and licensed under creative commons (and it’s free)
:
http://www.blendercookie.com/2009/11/14/model-male-base-mesh/
Great tut, this will be really good to go with the Porsche modelling one
I liked the tutorial, it was sort of a David Ward style where he shows mistakes and how to fix them. It helps because I usually stuff my rigs up and have no idea how to fix them.
Damn good tut.
I cant make it work. I use the same settings as in the tutorial, but my front wheels move if I move the car sideways. It only works if it is aligned with the world…
Probably you have your car facing a different direction than the one in the tutorial?
I love how you explore diverse topices Jonathan, and that they are usually useable in a multitude of applications.
I was cringing a lot at this tut, you spent most of the time working out you own mistakes…
I don’t know what you do to prepare for a tut but I would jot down all the steps with full detail go though them and do a test tut then a real tut but still keep the notes you have written down.
but im sorry to say this tut is a shambles but keep making then cause your really good you just didn’t seem organized for this one.
I first thought the mistakes where annoying, but then I realised they are great because it shows lots of the mistakes one can make and what it is that creates those problems. So basically I learned more from the mistakes in this tutorial than from what was correct.
Great tutorial JONATHAN – exactly what I am searching about, thanks!
Fantastic! I was just thinking about this for an animation. Dang, this site teaches me everything I want to know!
Awesome! I actually made a simpler car model for some testing a couple of days ago and now I know how to spin these wheel, so this is great! Thank you!
Is it possible to get the wheels to stop rotating while the whole thing is still moving?
If you turn the Transformation constraints influence to 0 the wheels will no longer automatically rotate. You can also keyframe this value by right-clicking on it.
-Jonathan
Is it possible to create an armature based on separate objects (meshes) as opposed to a single mesh? The wheels for example are separated into different objects, or does creating an armature only work for a single mesh?
I seem to remember that you could do this in 2.49 but have not figured out how in 2.5.
Thanks.
Yeah, you can:
- set your armature to pose mode
- select your wheel object, then shift+select your wheel bone
- ctrl+p and select ‘Bone’
So, I used this tut to rig a car I had already made, everything was pretty spot on. I have noticed a few things I would love if someone can explain.
1) if you animate the “Base bone and do a 180 turn and head the other way the tires will start turning the oposite direction.
2) And I would love to know how you would animate this on a path? Do you just add a bone constraint to follow the path attached to the base bone? I’ve actually tried that and tried to follow an object animating along a path with not much success. Any input here would be stellar.
Side note: the errors dont bug me, It actually makes thing more clear. I run into that tuff all the time so watching a someone do a tut that needs to back track is no big deal.
Addition to last post.
Being a citizen member I downloaded the working file and noticed that if you rotate the bone 90 degrees on the z axis the wheels stop turning when you move the base bone along its local y axis. it only works when moving it along the world y axis. I know its a pretty basic tut on rigging a car but it would be cool if you can throw us a “Bone”
(armature humor) on how to translate this or get the car to animate correctly along a circular path perhaps.
Thanks
Hey Brandon,
Another user pointed this problem out to me and I am still looking for a way to solve it. I believe this is actually a limitation of the Transformation constraint and the rigging may need to be done in another way. My current thought it to use Drivers but I will have to experiment with it a bit more. If I can come up with a solution you can expect a follow-up tutorial!
-Jonathan
To fix this problem, you need to define a space which follows the rotation of the base bone, and a target object in that space which follows the location of same bone. You can then target this object in the wheel constraints instead of the bone.
To do this!…
- create an empty at the origin, and add a constraint to copy the rotation of the base bone
- create another empty, make it a child of the first empty, and add a constraint to copy the location of base bone
- modify your wheel constraints to target the second empty
- the target should be evaluated in ‘Local(w/o parent) Space’
- change the Transform mapping from the target’s Y location to X (I don’t understand why I had to do this step, but it worked!)
Hope this is intelligible,
Simon.
Couldn’t the steering bones have been done with IK?
Well I don’t like all of the mistakes, at all. Luckily I was able to get past it, but still.
very nice
but can u show me how to do it in blender 2.49 because this version is different
Hi there,
We actually no longer support Blender 2.49. Many things have changed in Blender since then. I highly recommend upgrading to Blender 2.61.
Trying to build a rig that will allow a car model to burnout and fishtail before gaining traction and speeding away. Can this be done using this rig? I’ve been trying for days to get Phillipe’s rig from BlenderNation to work, which I understand to be the most popular method. Any ideas?
Can this rig be exported to Unity with the same functionallity?