CAR ANIMATION IN UNREAL ENGINE | Production Pipeline

[Music] foreign if you ever tried to make a car animation over Automotive cinematic in Unreal Engine you probably use kev's vehicle to make this perfect curve you want for your shot or for a client you did it again again and again and again finally you have spent an hour to nail this perfect tone which you desired so much you create your sequence and record the take place cameras render it and send it to the client if you work commercially only to get this response foreign if you really need to use chaos vehicle for car animations because after this comment from the client you need to start from scratch yes cash vehicle is a perfect game asset you can use it for personal projects and for playing around it has great physics physics is cool and stuff but the truth is it sucks hi everyone and welcome back to my channel for those of you who are there for the first time I'm leading real engine artist and post-production Company and I'm mostly focused on Automotive CGI and animations in today's video we will get into simple Automotive Recreation make some widgets for animation and learn how to make this kind of sequence almost effortless that's also how it's done by impossible object studio and you have probably seen the Cinematic of Alfa Romeo where they have used their custom car rig I still find this approach far away from perfect but it will definitely make your life easier with the car animations for this tutorial I'll be using the free Ford Mustang model which I found in the internet I will create skeleton with blender add-on called ue4 vehicle and it will be our starting point I'm not going to spend a lot of time for explaining in details how it works in blender there are a bunch of videos showing it basically you select every wheel and body of the car with picker and click rig vehicle [Music] exported and slept on real engine you can also download this Ford Model already prepared for input to Unreal from the link in the description so if you'd like you can pause the video right now download it and create the rig together with me one important model makes sure that the skeletal mesh box is checked if all is correct you will have three assets mesh skeleton and physical acid open physics asset and select all Wheels Collision bodies change primitive types to sphere and click regenerate bodies select body collision change primitive type to multi-convex Hull and again click regenerate bodies you may need to do that in case if you would like to collide your control rig with some props in your cinematics and it's better to have proper Collision bounds for that afterwards right click on skeletal mesh create control rig now let's program the control rig open control rig asset here we have our carbon structure which consists of five bones root for body and whole mesh and bone for each wheel which is rare left wheel rare right front left and front right it's the typical naming which you get from blender than I used for rigging first thing we are going to create is control for the root right click on the root select new control it will tilt body of the car click F2 to rename it and name it body next is Will rotation control I will create it from will but it doesn't matter where you create the control itself I will name it wheel rotation and lastly steering control now we need to create new null which will store our controls it is very important that the null is not connected to any bone of the car or any other control otherwise Rick will not work properly so please pay attention to it right click on empty field not a boon or any other control and select new null let's name it control space select all your controls and drag them under control space we just created now let's change colors of the controls to make our rig a little bit fancy later body will be blue rotation yellow and steering green pick whatever you like after it's done pick body control and drag the note graph select get control after that drag root bone to node graph and select add offset it will add relative offset to our root bone as we only need to feed rotation to the body expand transform pin on both nodes and connect only rotation let's check how it works drag forward solve output to offset transform select the body control and try to rotate it great it works but we don't want it to affect our wheels and checkbox propagate to children now let's test it again alright it works perfect now we will create student control it's very important in which order those controls are executed so you can't create wheel rotation before steering otherwise you will get super weird results drag steering to node graph and select get control expand transform and translation we will use movement on y-axis to steer the Wheels drag y pin and look for multiply node set the B value to 0.35 in my opinion it works best Now look for the note called from Euler expand the pin and connect result of multiply node to Z Now select two bones front left and front right wheels and drag them to no graph select add offset expand offset transform pins connect rotation result from Euler now drag execute pin from previous controls to wheels don't forget to connect all offset control execute pins so both wheels will turn fantastic now we can easily control our car's steering to make our control rig a little bit more clean let's create the sequence node this node will dictate the order of our transforms first goes body second is steering last will be will rotation if for some reason initial position of your wheels are not straight check and control details that it doesn't have any offset on y-axis like in my case I needed to reset it after that initial will position was fine I will make also some comments for controls to make it look even better now the hardest part which is wheel rotation and we are done I promise right click on node grab window and type get control float in the node select wheel rotation control drag float value pin and create multiply node I use value 50 as after tests I found it works the best for me now multiply this again drag B value pin and type half P drag result of this calculation and look for node accumulated time next look for node from Euler and connect accumulated time to y-axis drag all four wheel bones into node window as usual select add offset expand offset transform for each bone and connect result to rotation of each bone now I'll make my rig look tidy I will add another pin for the sequence node and will connect everything in the rotation graph at this point I can accelerate and reverse all of the wheels at once control steering and body tilt if you'd like you can start animating right now with a current setup but I decided to add some shapes and add some limits to them to make the rig look more fancy as I said before it's super easy to do select any of your controls select shape and change shape size also I changed the control type for body to or Rotator so only rotation will be present in the sequencer which makes it easier to use after that I set limits to Min and Max values from -3 to 3. [Music] [Music] so no matter how far I rotate card body will not break its bounds after that I set limits for each of the controls for steering it is -50 to 50. foreign rotation set the type of transformed position it's important so you just drag it back and forth for wheel rotation limits for real rotation are -20 to 20 on x-axis after all of that hit compile and Save as always done I will show you what I managed to make in a couple of minutes I attached Ctrl rig to camera Rail and animated its position after that I have played around with the wheel rotation values to make Wheels rotate properly on start and end it's nothing special just align well when the car breaks or starts I find this approach much better than animating each will individually because you need to calculate how much of the rotation should be applied to the wheel for the car travel in certain distance and this is much better you just set up the values from zero to some point when the car accelerates or breaks until the point it feels real after that I tilt the body a bit to add the feeling of acceleration and break-in in approximately 5 minutes I had this result [Music] okay super easy to do now would you like to see how I did that what I showed you in the beginning of this video okay sure but first don't forget to subscribe to my channel and like this video this really helps me with the production of the new episodes in this mustang drift in the city sample project I use same approach I have created a rig rail attached control rig to it and animated Car steering wheel rotation and body tilt foreign form on your rotation of the control rig asset to make it drip then I have created the camera added some camera Shake made a render and did a little of color grading I am lying to I color graded that a lot in DaVinci Resolve added some sound effects and it's done creating these sequence with hand animation took me about 15 to 20 minutes but creating the same thing with chaos vehicle would take me about an hour and if client asks me to make car move slower or faster I will just change couple keyframes instead of starting from a scratch as I mentioned in the beginning using physically accurate assets it's not very productive as it gives you unpredictable results and doesn't suit the animation Pipeline on real car commercials director has Precision driver a person who drives professionally and can make design turn curve or drift or accelerate at desired rate to perform a perfect take the director is looking for in case of cast vehicle you'll also need a Precision driver but well in unreal engine it is very time consuming and this approach is horrendous when you need to make changes from the client's comments I know there are a lot of add-ons which you can buy and get proper car simulations with suspension physics and stuff in blender for example but on real project it makes you jump back and forth between this software for any changes that client demands baking and import animations from blender Maya or use a live link to fit it to Unreal that can increase your delivery times and I'm not taking into account the price for such addends or Maya itself this is the reason why we mostly see cars driving on straight line on CGI videos on Flat Road barely making any turns in my opinion it's much better to have everything in one software and not jumping back and forth on them so great in the control rigging Unreal Engine and the Hand key in the animation of it would be much better and more practical solution thanks for watching and see you in the next one

Channel: Post Processed

Views: 89,018

Keywords: unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5.2, unreal engine 5 short film, unreal engine 5 matrix, unreal engine 5 demo, car crash test, unreal engine short film, car animation, Unreal car, unreal car animation, car rig, unreal car rig, production pipeline, post processed, unreal engine animation, vehicle animation, unreal engine cinematic, car cinematic, unreal engine car render, path tracing, lumen render, how to animate cars, car animation in unreal

Id: vGPOuI0C0ZI

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2023