Slot Car Cars Theme Rig
Since my last video about the variable FK autorigger ( vimeo.com/86643864 ) gained me quite a few likes and followers I thought I could entertain you all a bit more. Initially I planned to use this as a portfolio piece because I still had the racing track rig from when I made in for The Augmented ( vimeo.com/84819394 ) and back then thought it was a pretty neat setup but while cleaning it up it felt not as interesting as I remembered it. Anyway I modeled a simple cars-like slot car and made this short animation. However the cool part about the rig. The rig is fully deformable and flip free, what that means: because the text below is confusing, look at this picture dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13889971/slot_car_exp.png Normally when you attach an object to a motion path your object will be flipping in loopings or screw-shaped parts because the curve on which the object is attached does not really know which direction is "up". So you need a way to figure out another way to get the rotation. Of course there is the possibility to copy the curve and offset as well as tweak it manually where needed, but most of the time you don't even need to do this manual part. Often you can get a working offset curve by extruding your racing track surface and duplicating the surface curves. However it can be even simpler. I used three locators and two curves for the setup in this video. one locator is attached to the curve (translation only) and is the main transform for our object. the second locator runs along the same curve but always a few frames behind the attach-locator. the third locator is attached to the second curve which I got from another edge loop next running the same way the first curve. by using a closest point constraint (from attach locator on this curve) for this locator will always get the right position for an aim constraint. This way we basically get a tringle parralel to the base of the car object and all the rotations we need. if the attach locator is aim constrained to aim at the locator on the second curve with follow locator as up object the car will always be in the right position with zero modeling and tweaking of control vertices. last but not least. Did I use utterly over the top sounds effects for the car from a drifting video? yes, yes I did. Was it fun? kinda. Music: Professor Kliq - Bust That Bust
