Rigging Vehicles with Rigid Body Physics in Blender 3.0

Use Blender's physics engine to create more accurate motion for your vehicle animations

What you'll learn
Learn how to rig and tune 5 different vehicles that you can "drive" in real time
Create accurate, simulated suspension geometries - Trailing arm, Double wishbone, Solid Axle, MacPherson Strut and Twist Beam
Learn the basics of suspension design
Learn techniques that will allow you to efficiently rig a drivable vehicle in about 30 minutes
Techniques in this course can be expanded to other machinery eg robots, cranes etc.
Learn the basics and caveats of Rigid Bodies and Rigid Body Constraints in Blender

Requirements
Blender 3.0+
Some experience in Blender is helpful but not required
No Addons required
Starts with the basics of Rigid Bodies

Description
This course will walk you through a more realistic way of rigging your vehicle using Blender's Physics engine. By using Rigid Bodies and Rigid Body Constraints, you can literally drive your vehicle through your scene. This method lets the physics engine calculate all the vehicle's motion like, camber angles, wheel speeds, body roll, brake dive etc, making your vehicle's motion much more realistic!

The techniques used in this course are aimed at making the finicky nature of using Rigid Bodies more manageable and efficient. While some knowledge of Blender is helpful, this course starts from beginner friendly introductions to Rigid Bodies and Constraints.

Blender 3.0+ is recommended, no addons required. Only very light modeling is used, course includes all the models used. Completed .blend files included for all applicable lectures. All vehicles are based on 3d Scanned real vehicles.

This course goes over

Rigid Bodies and Constraints

The Rigid Body World

Custom Properties

Drivers

Physics

Vehicle Suspensions

Armatures and Inverse Kinematics

A few different suspension types are explored: Double Wishbone, Solid Axle, Trailing Arm, MacPherson Strut, and Twist Beam.

By the end of the course you will be able to "drive" a vehicle around a dynamic scene all by adjusting driver inputs: Acceleration, Braking, Steering, Parking Brake and Target Speed. An experimental section to control your vehicle using an XBox One (or similar) controller is also included (only tested in Windows).