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I've been working freelance at various animation and vfx studios in NYC for the last few years and have recently gone bi-coastal working temporarily in LA.  I also teach animation at the School of Visual Arts.

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Introducing Vehicle Toolkit

Vehicle Toolkit is a full featured vehicle rigging solution for autodesk Maya software loaded with animator friendly features to produce motion from the most simple to as realistic or exaggerated as you can imagine.  With production level controls animate any vehicle with ease and reliablility.  You provide the vehicle model to us, you get back a fully functioning vehicle rig, in most cases, under 24 hours.

Some of the features include:

  • Robust set of production level vehicle controls

    The vehicle toolkit rig has enough control for most day to day vehicle animations and has the flexibility to customize for just about any need.

  • Two types of auto tire rotation

    The vehicle toolkit rig supports two types of automatic tire rotation. Type one looks at each individual wheel and how far it traveled from the previous frame to determine its orientation in space. Type 2 looks at how far the vehicle has traveled down a motion path (animation must be based on a motion path for type 2 to work) and determines orientation from that distance. Auto tire rotation can be turned off all together to animate manually. Hand keyed animation can be added on top of either form of auto rotation as well. Tire nodes are grouped conveniently in sets for easy baking out to keyframe data.

  • Dynamic/manual suspension

    A dynamic suspension system is integrated into every vehicle toolkit rig to simulate body roll of the vehicle.  Simulation can be turned off for hand key animation or keyframes can be added on top of and work in conjunction with the simulated body roll. As with all simulated parts of a vehicle toolkit rig, a bake set exist for conversion to keyframe data.

  • Tire to ground collision detection

    Tires automatically compress when pressed up a ground control node via standard maya deformers. Amount of deformation is controllable via easy to locate attributes or can be turned off completely.

  • Support for non-Symmetrical Vehicles

    Vehicle toolkit rigs are not constrained to any sort of symmetry. Wheels can all be different sizes and placed in any individual location and features such as tire rotation will still work accordingly.

Timelapse of a Vehicle Toolkit Rig being applied to a car model by Dave Chen.

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