Launch Control makes animating cars Fun!
LC (Launch Control) strives to make vehicle animation accessible and eliminates the usual problems you stumble over, when turning your action-sequence dreams into reality (a virtual reality, that is).
The simple interface packs a ton of power and in the “Manual Gearbox” you have a world of customization options to tune LC to your liking.
1. Lazy Rigging
– one-click setup!
Well… The headline kinda says it.
When rigging with LC the add-on recognizes a long list of tags to automatically detect wheels, body, brakes, headlights and with some math-magic rigs your 4-wheeled car for you.
Helpful pop-ups will appear if naming adjustments of wheels, body etc. are needed. (Please check the documentation for requirements for one-click rigging)
In the “Manual Gearbox” it is possible to alter rigging options to make LC play well with your own pipeline.
2. Animate like a BOSS
– with neat presets!
Do you want your ride to jump, drift, wiggle, do donuts, go offroad or all of the above?
LC is designed to take care of all of these things. The presets give you a headstart no matter what you want your new “wheels” to do.
2.1. Make it your own!
Once you are set up with a preset, it’s easy to build on top of it.
Add as many extra control points as you want and hit the “Update Driving Path” button.
This makes sure that the existing animation will not be offset like it normally would when animating without LC.
3. Art Direct Physics
– for Trucks, Super cars, and even RC cars!
Simming can be a pain.
That’s why LC has dialed in presets that will cover you in most cases – and most importantly… LC bakes FAST!
If you want full control, head into the “Manual Gearbox” and reveal the physics sliders to manually set the weight, softness, wiggle speed and more.
3.1. Fast iteration with PostFX!
Sometimes you just want more body-roll, less body-bounciness and a tad more pitch.
– Well, in that case just fix that in real-time with PostFX – No need to re-sim over and over again.
Quick Export to Unreal Engine 5
– and other epic DCCs
With the quick export menu you can painlessly export to Unreal Engine 5, Nvidia Omniverse, Cinema 4D and more. LC takes care of the translation of the data so it reads correctly when imported.
Quick Export works with “light” models and uses the native Blender FBX exporter. If you want to use LC in your UE pipeline you can also use datasmith to translate the data. This way you have more options and preferences to play around with when exporting.
Ackermann Steering Geometry
– you might not know it, but you need it in your life!
You probably tried other rigs where everything looks great… – until the car is going through a curve. How hard can it be to make a car turn in CG?! – Quite hard, I figured…
Until I discovered the Ackermann Steering Geometry. It’s fully built into the core of the rig and saves you a bunch of fiddling with messed-up steering.
Automated Ground Detection
– optimizing detection on the fly
When you have built out your stage, drop all the objects that will affect the movement of the car into the “groundDetection” collection. High poly, low poly, messy – doesn’t matter, just throw it in there.
A grid is wrapped over this collection, removing any unused areas to save performance. You can preview the grid and increase/decease the quality in the “Manual Gearbox”.
Automatic Camber and Caster
– the small details that makes it all pop!
Maybe you have heard about camber and caster angles? Well, I hadn’t…
But! Because of the advanced suspension geometry in cars today, wheels do not just turn around the Z-axis like most of us imagine. No, no, camber and caster tilts the rotation axis in 2 unique ways and even though the rig does not physically do this, it takes care of visually copying this behaviour for you. And with the UI slider above the car, you can control the amount of camber/caster to your liking.
Plays well with “Car Transportation”
– and other epic model libraries
With “Car Transportation” and Launch Control together, you will be able to drop a wide range of cars into your scene and rig them with Launch Control with just 1 click.
Check it out over here: https://blendermarket.com/products/transportation
Speed-o-meter
– helps you animate for realism
Photo-realism is often a pain to get right. And one of the things that often feels off in car animations is the speed. – So that’s why LC has a speed-o-meter that shows you the speed of the car in real-time for you to ground your animation in reality (I mean, if you want – I don’t judge if you want some TrackMania-type craziness.)
HDR Headlight Texture Presets
– well.. They are headlights
6 included headlight presets can be applied to make your night renders look even more real. Both high and low beam spot lights are set-up in the rig and will be automatically rigged if headlights are detected in the car mesh.
Jump generator
– with projectile Physics!
It turns out that it’s quite difficult to make a car jump look real – So I thought… Why not simulate it with projective physics? And well.. See result above.
this is the best car rigging addon I have ever used thank you so much Vfxmed.com to bring all of the delicious meals for Blender and ue5 for us for free.
I can’t open the link it says
Software error:
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For help, please send mail to the webmaster (root@localhost), giving this error message and the time and date of the error.
can you please fix this
Thank you
try now
I have tried multiple times but it always gets stuck on download page and no download link appears. Can you please fix it I really need the addon for my project.
The link is not working even after trying multiple times
Could you please help me with this?
whats the error
unable to open the link please help me with this
Link not working..plz send me on email
no