How to Animate Cars for Unreal Engine Automotive | Maya Car Rig | UAC Rig

hey guys in this video i'll be animating a few little shots using the uac rig in maya and then exporting the fbx data to the unreal engine i'll be putting together a race scene that you see here and this is using the free automotive bridge map and free automotive material pack found on the unreal marketplace you probably know these already but i'll put links in the description just in case this beautiful mclaren p1 model this was given to me by brandoville academy really great model thanks for that and i'll put a link to the branderville academy website in the description below as well let's set up the mclaren p1 import the uac rig snap the green arrow to the front wheel center the red arrow to the rear wheel center select both controls and hit front view move the controls just outside the tire and adjust the tire width so the guide is also just outside the tire go to side view set the tire sidewall to just outside the rim now there's no interior on this model so we can just hide the steering wheel control and we're resized so hide the top node and we can just eliminate the pieces as we connect them we're rendering this one in unreal so we want a clean skeletal mesh we can export as an fbx to do that we're going to use the skin method select your tires hit the tire button select your calipers if you have them hit the caliper button select your wheel pieces and hit the wheel button and finally select the rest of your bits and hit the body button this car is now rigged and ready to go so let's give it a quick test it drives we can steer and the tires are working so save this scene this is your master rig file we'll be importing copies of this shortly to create a few animations before we animate we're going to export the skeletal mesh to unreal again make sure you've saved your scene select the root joint go to select hierarchy highlight all of the attributes right click and break connections i'm parent the root joint and also all of your geometry including any chassis pieces you want to use just pull them right out now delete the rig select all your model pieces and the root joint and go to file export selected set the drop down to fbx and export it let's move to unreal and bring it in this is the free automotive bridge map from the unreal marketplace all i did was load it and nothing's been changed i recommend creating a new directory in your content browser for you to import your skeletal mesh that you exported from maya so drag it on in uncheck animation or it will bring in an empty animation file give it a moment the imported materials will show up as well along with the skeletal mesh and the skeleton file let's open the skeletal mesh looks a bit sad at the moment with these imported materials so i'm going to assign the automotive exterior materials there's a great selection here and they have a material for everything so let's start with the paint add the tires the caliper paint plastic a nice light metal brake rotor face and these three here are lights and they have a nice set of emissive materials here as well brake lights let's take a peek what a glow see the headlights let me toss the transparent material on the light cover first so we can see what's underneath there we go i'm going to use a honeycomb reflector for the blinker looks alright and the secondary car paint we're going to use charcoal i think that's all of it if you go to the character button and go to bones all hierarchy you can turn on the skeleton you can attach effects to any of these joints if you export the light version you would not have these double rings of joints on each wheel these are the joints that allow your tires to deform so let's turn that off and save it and we can close it once you have your materials linked up you can delete these imported materials that came with your fbx and that's it your car's ready to go so we can instance the car now into the map just by dragging it in let's take a quick look at it lit and it looks like i missed one of course i did let's open it back up again the glass and there it is let's drop on a tinted glass because we don't have an interior i'll save it let's get out of here and go back to the map and look at that wow that is wicked this is how the bridge map loads it's already set up like this for you let's get this thing moving i'm going to animate a little race scene five cars driving along this bridge so i think it's a good idea that we take this bridge and bring it into maya so we've got a good guide so to do that select your pieces and go to file export selected we're going to name it turn off collisions and we don't need vertex colors and export let's go back to maya and bring it in i'm going to start a new maya scene and let's import the bridge just drag it in this might take a little while and there we go let's take a look at the road it's in segments and it's triangulated so this won't be easy to pull a curve from but it is a flat road and a pretty simple shape so we might be better off just doing a top view and drawing a curve so let's put it on a group now this is taking a while i think there's probably a lot of pieces to this bridge there it is let's pop to a top view and draw a nice clean curve so go up to create curve tools and pick the cv curve tool i'll give yourself enough points here so you can move it around easily later looks good now we want to see this bridge but we don't want to select it again so open the layer editor and create a new layer set the layer to reference this will keep it visible and won't allow you to select it so add the bridge to the layer and we can close this with soft selection turned on you can play with the curves pretty easily and i like to move them around a little bit because a perfect curve is a boring curve this first path here is going to be our focus car and i want to have it drive by the camera and oversteer as it turns so i need this bend in the curve path to be a little bit tighter something like that i'm gonna name this curve and i'm going to duplicate it five times because we want five cars in the shot i'm gonna straighten this curve out a bit i don't want all of them following this type curve that we just made let's give it a bit of variation move some points around you know what i should have duplicated them before i added that type bend so i'm just going to delete the duplicates and use this one instead to make the copies from so i'm going to smooth this one out a bit next one now it's just a matter of making each path a little different they're all trying to win so i would assume that they would be moving closer to the inside of this corner more than the outside and we can come back to these any time and tweak it this will give us a great starting point i'm happy with this so let's save the scene and we can bring in the root card that we set up earlier give it a second to load in and it looks like i left an empty group in there when i saved it i'm just going to delete that let's frame up the car now bring in the next one number three four and number five now to really speed things up here we're going to animate all cars at the same time to do that we're going to create some selection sets the layers we have here are handy for this so turn them all off except for skeletons and select all the root joints and go to create sets quick select set call it root joints or something like that and now we can easily access all five root joints when we export later on let's turn those off and show the controls now grab all the root controls and go to create sets quick select set and call it root controls now select the drive controls same thing again go to create sets quick select sets let's call it drive controls body next and call it body controls while this is selected let's turn on dynamics for a moment now we can select all the dynamic controls and add that to our final selection set and we'll call that dynamic controls let's go back and turn dynamics off and on the root control let's turn on proxy mode let's turn the mesh layer back on and now we can link each car to its own path these selection sets will make things so much easier when we animate so let's load the uac rig ui and we have more than one rig in the scene so we need to update the tool until i don't know which car we're working on and to do that we just select the root control of the car you want to use and hit this long button along the top and this will set it as the active rig now we can select our first curve and hit add curve path first one's done and there it is at the start of the path now select your second route set it as active now select your second curve and add the path third car set as active and add the path fourth same thing set active and again add the path and finally the last one set it active and let's add the path now we can close this there they are all lined up to hide them all except for the first car select all the drive controls and we can easily do that with our selection set so we're going to right click on it and hit select members and now we have all of our car drive control selected so anything we do will affect all five cars at the same time key the path drive attribute at zero and let's jump forward to 200 frames or so and drive the car down the path and that's key again so let's play this and see how we're doing for timing feels a bit slow especially for a supercar so let's pull the key in a bit let's play it better let's unhide the bridge and put together a decent camera angle this one's a bit flat but i think it's going to work for now so let's unhide the cars and open the graph editor offset these path drive keys so we can shift them about a bit and stagger the cars so they're not all on top of each other we just want to shift them around and spread them out a bit all right so let's take a look it's going to shift this one a bit more and let's set those curves to linear now the fov needs to change here so we can get something a little closer this scene is crying out for some tilt so let's add that in it's such a big change for something so simple get a little bit closer and maybe a touch more tilt not bad let's leave it there for now i'm going to duplicate this camera so we can keep that angle and set this one back to how it was and we can pop back and forth as we need to i'm going to make this a little bit tighter this turn let's pull it out a little bit more and i want to add some oversteer as well to this one and i'm going to select this car's drive control just this one this time we don't want this to affect every car and now i can add some oversteer i think i'm going to focus on this one car as well so let's hide the other ones let's key it before and after and add in some oversteer how's that i think we need to pull it closer to the camera so we can see it better and maybe tweak the path so the bend is not so far away now the oversteer happens a little bit later so let's shift that over a bit and i'm going to push it further make it more dramatic the bend needs to be a little bit tighter as well and i think it needs to slow down a bit during the oversteer a little curved tweak and let's see in our camera let's make it start a tad earlier let's give it another look nice and dramatic i like it yeah that's not too bad let's bring in the other cars almost there some of these cars are a little close to the main one so let's move them back a bit pull this one tight against the inside of the road quick look at the camera this one's bugging me a bit so i think i'm going to have him do some oversteer as well a couple of quick keys and let's have another look yeah time for a play blast let's bring in all the cars and let's hide the controls and play blast here it is and that one might be the one so let's add some subtle dynamics select the body control selection set hit select set members turn on dynamics for all of them now we can select the dynamic selection set and hit select set members now we have all the dynamic controls selected and let's tighten the suspension a little bit by reducing the sensitivity let's also cut the influence down everywhere and you know what it's moving pretty fast so we might need to reduce it a little bit more yeah let's keep it subtle and let's try that on one car see how it looks that looks fine let's check it on the oversteer car that's a bit heavy so let's pull it back a bit maybe point one yeah that's better let's play blast it okay that looks good except for the one at the back and one looks a bit mental so let's reduce the spring on that there we go now i have a pretty neat camera tool i built for my dead fuse project and it's really working out well so i'm going to use that right now to add a little something extra here i recently put this tool up on my site it's just a name camera with a set of neat attributes that you can use to quickly add some tilt handheld motion and a camera shake it's worth checking out it's pretty cool so let me add in a few keys move the target around a bit and i'm just going to add some noise to give it a little bit more of a handheld feel let's crank it up let's watch it on one car so we can get a bit of frame rate good all right let's turn on all the cars let's switch the dynamics on and do a final play blast before we bring it into unreal right let's do it save the scene and this might take a little while to save because you've got a bridge and five cars there let's grab the root joints of all five cars and you can find them easily in the selection set we made earlier also grab the camera and let's bake the animation down go to edit keys bake simulation and make sure below is active hit apply ah you know what i should have took a play blast with the mclaren p1s active actually before baking so whilst on my mind i'll do that so let's wait for this to finish and now i can turn off proxy and let's blast that with the mclaren p1s active okay let's get this exported so first let's select all the skeleton roots again and your camera i'm going to hit shift p to unparent them all now you can delete everything else in the scene and we do this because when you export this and bring it into unreal we don't want any extra pieces coming in we just want to bring in the animations and apply them to the skeletal mesh that we already set up in unreal so grab the camera export selected i'm going to call it bridge cam and hit export now the first route export selected name it bridge race or bridge car one makes more sense hit export next one export selected bridge car two number three four our last car number five import the new animations to unreal drag them in select the skeleton that we added earlier if it isn't already selected and hit import all give it a moment and let's bring in four more cars and put them on our bridge let's change the colors green about red for this one silver and orange this one can stay as is now under the animation tab and let me just grab some more room here hopefully you can see this list pop up you want to set your animation mode to use animation asset and use this drop down to select your new animation one next one uses animation two third one uses animation three fourth car two animation four and finally number five now we want to set our transforms to zero zero zero for all the cars this will put the cars in their correct position so select all of them at once and we want all zeros for location and rotation now if we zoom out here for a minute when we offset the curves in maya to stagger the cars when we were doing that animation we caused the cars to pop to the end of the curve because the motion loops i was a bit lazy and i could have avoided this if i set a few keys but this is a good thing to show you if i play the animation here we're only going to see the first car show up now unreal optimizes distance so because these cars are starting at the end of the curve they won't show up in the camera they're actually too far away unless we have them in the view at the same time when we hit play so if i look over here where most of the cars are and press play and then quickly look back now we see all the cars playing as we would expect a little bit of an odd thing and i'm sure you can tweak that with a distance setting somewhere but just to let you know that's there so let's stop that and bring in our camera to do that we're going to go to cinematics we're going to add a level sequencer and create a new one i'm going to call this one demo i'm going to double click the red box here and you'll see the sequencer window click the camera icon and i'll right click the new camera and hit import and select your camera fbx file i usually uncheck all of these and then just hit import if your camera comes in blurry just go down to the focus settings here and change it from manual to tracking also pick the object that you want to track i'm just going to pick one of the cars now because of that draw distance thing i mentioned we need to keep all the cars in view when we hit render or the sequence will ignore the cars that are too far away it's probably a draw distance setting or something like that somewhere i haven't looked for it but i'm sure it exists somewhere and that will probably fix it as well so i'm going to go ahead and render this out and here's the scene [Music] here's another animation i did pretty quickly i want the car to reverse out of a parking space and just drive away so i use the curved path to reverse and then i just translate the drive control off the path to drive away and then brought this animation into the free unreal beach map and here it is playing now cars in this beach map look amazing this is a really nice map so here is lit and you'll see what i mean here it is rendered and here it is one more time that is one beautiful car model and a beautiful map now before i sign off version 2.3 is out now it had three things changed one there was a curve point update issue when you re-add curves that were previously removed that's now fixed the second thing was dynamic motion would jolt abruptly on a very tightly spiraled curve or when the curves intersect at a tight proximity so that's also fixed and the third thing was a pretty fun request wait for it there it is you can now make your car fly there's a new fly attribute on the drive control that adjusts all wheels at once and also a fly attribute on each wheel for individual adjustments these attributes play well with toe and the steering although you might want to set your wheel multipliers to zero if you want to stop the wheels spinning when the car moves around there we go that brings us to the end of the video the uac rig is a very powerful tool for animating your vehicles i wanted to show you just how easy it is to get it into unreal engines amazing automotive pipeline thanks for watching guys subscribe ring the bell and give it a like if you want to see more see you soon

Channel: Simon Mills

Views: 16,056

Rating: 4.9215684 out of 5

Keywords: animate cars unreal engine, unreal engine automotive, unreal automotive, ue4 automotive, ue4 car animation, unreal engine car animation, unreal engine cars animation, unreal engine automotive animation, unreal automotive animation, ue4 automotive animation, vehicle animation maya, maya automotive rigging, maya car rig, car rig in maya, car rig maya, car rigging maya, rigging car in maya, rig car using maya, maya car animation, maya car rig plugin, maya chassis rig, uac rig

Id: U7uahTRrD5c

Length: 34min 15sec (2055 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021