This is a prop rig i've been working on.
I first made a concept (here in pencil and side and front view, with a light box i was able to get them roughly to match)
I then modeled the car in Maya.
Before i started to rig the car i briefly wrote out what i wanted to add:
doors open close ---
front wheels rotate ---
wheel can spin ---
all windows can go up and down ---
back trunk open (future feature)
chairs can be adjusted front and back (future feature)
As seen there were somethings i moved to a future feature. And the stretch i added later after seeing a preliminary animation. Also when doing the windows i had to go back to the modeling stage to fix them so they could scale more easily.
for the stretch on car i used a couple lattice blendshapes with a nonlinear bend deformer. (i'm guessing this is not the most efficient way of approaching this, but to get some quick artistic view of the effect i went along with this approach for now)
for the wheel spin i used a sine function and the modulo operator
-- without going too much into the math.. i looked at the sine function and how it can go between 0 and 1 depending on a driver amount (example a wheel rotation converted into radians). I then figured out a way to change distance the car moved into a usable degree/radian the sine function could use to get a 0 to 1 value ( i used modulo 90 so any distance would be converted to something between -90 to 90 ). The trick i used was to in a sense cycle the sine function in just the 0-pi/2 range so the wheel would look as if it is continuously spinning by using the modulo operator (in mel fmod).
To control how much wheel spinning happened i added a final multiplier value to the output of the sine function. Finally, i fed the degree rotation output to the actual wheels so they would start spinning. Here's the expression i wrote in MEL with this sort of math.
// //----AUTO WHEEL SPIN EXPRESSION //----- this would be better if could use a custom curve for figuring out wheel rotation //----- it would be better if could use any coordinate system not just 0 to 90 //------ autoWheelSpin_grp, distanceTraveled is where getting distance of car move, autoWheelSpin_grp, rX where putting rotation onto wheel float $input = autoWheelSpin_grp.distanceTraveled; float $travelDegree = 0.0; $travelDegree = fmod($input, 90);//so just using the 0-pi/2 range of sine function float $travelRad = 0; $travelRad = (3.14/180) * ($travelDegree); float $autoRotateInDeg = 0.0; $autoRotateInDeg = sin( $travelRad )*360; //the ease is a way of customizing number of revolutions of wheel, example make more spins by increasing it, or make wheels not rotate by setting to 0 autoWheelSpin_grp.l_frontTire_rot = $autoRotateInDeg * autoWheelSpin_grp.ease * (1/autoWheelSpin_grp.globalScale); autoWheelSpin_grp.r_frontTire_rot = $autoRotateInDeg * autoWheelSpin_grp.ease* (1/autoWheelSpin_grp.globalScale); autoWheelSpin_grp.backTire_rot = $autoRotateInDeg * autoWheelSpin_grp.ease* (1/autoWheelSpin_grp.globalScale);
for some organization i had the model for car referenced into the car rig file. For the animation file i had both the car rig and character rig referenced.
Hope this is helpful.
Cheers,
Nate
