Make wheels rotate - Revolve constraint

Animation & Rigging
#1

I just want to give feedback on my rigging experience in Blender, as I’m quite new and found that problem be one of the biggest.
Blender currently has not solution to rig the wheels of any vehicle dynamically, other that using addon to bake that. So building your own car rig is close to impossible without scripting.
I found that the biggest miss in the rigging tools, beside parameter wiring, which hopeful comes some day along nodes.

In other software there exist various methods to do that. Either with script that does that dynamically without baking or with constraint that takes the world position, radius and outputs the rotation value. In theory the constraint only needs to know the position in the frame before and the one after.

So I hope someone cares about that. Would make a lot people happy.

#2

Solvers are a goal for geometry nodes, so I think it’s safe to assume that once the rigging/constraint pipeline is updated to make use of function nodes (backbone of geometry nodes) these will benefit from solvers as well. Developers are well aware of these limitations.
And the closest to parameter/attribute wiring would be drivers.

Cheers

1 Like
#3

The parameter wiring solution is already there, it’s called drivers. I have not used them much to have sufficient experience with them to be able to rig a vehicle, but I’ve seen many people successfully do so.

EDIT: Finally found the right one :smiley:

This one should show that drivers should be sufficient to cover most aspects.

#4

I currently use drivers too, but it only works on a single Axis movement. So if you do a follow path (and that thing needs rework too) then it does the job perfectly.

I will check out that video, but do not expect something new.

Anyhow, thanks for letting me know that the problem is known. Geo Nodes everything hopefully. Even drivers :wink:

#5

Good ideas are always welcome. However, there is a place for those, and this is not it. Please post on Right-Click Select — Blender Community. Make sure it’s fleshed out well, discuss with the community, and make sure the description ends up with detailed technical design as well as UI mockups, etc. That way, when a developer wants to work on it, all they need is right there.