Animating Cars in Blender with Launch Control 1.5

[@davidschaefer83]

Being involved behind the scenes a little bit, I'm of course always extremely pro Launch Control and Daniel's work. But I want to add that this is INSANE!! The amount of thought and power he is putting into this is crazy. I think it shows! And shout-out to Sven too (those who are in LC discord know who I am talking about). You guys rock!

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thanks a ton, David! And thank you for all the support, tips and knowledge you have provided us with for this project! ^^

[@davidschaefer83]

@@DanielVesterbaek so much deserved! I am honered to be contributing to this at all.

[@rentionedits]

I think it remains the best Addon for cars! Bravo Daniel!

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Aarh, thank you so much! So happy to hear this

[@FX_AnimationStudios]

FINALLY THE BEAST IS OUT!! congrats Daniel... 1.5 turned out great!! eager to use it.. multicar... sweet!!!

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Yeees! Took forever!! But hopefully this will be useful for many people :)

[@-PE-]

This looks like a good update. I used 1.3.55 for my recent car animation and encountered some problems: excessive body tilting on cambered roads or in the wrong direction while drifting so I used very low values, but now auto level might do the trick; also render stopping with speedometer enabled. I would also liked to be able to input exact values instead of sliders. Ex: suspension travel up in cm, camber or caster in degrees etc.

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Hi!! Oh, thanks for the nice words about the video! And thanks for sharing these things about the previous version. The physics in LC 1.5 is our own setup, so it's completely different from the physics in 1.3.55. The old one used Blender Softbodies to calculate everything which seems to base stuff on velocities (without the ability to change that), but the new one calculates accelerations and bases everything on that. It should give you much better results. We also removed the old speedometer and made a new one that doesn't cause crashes during rendering. And you can also use nurbs for the driving path now, which often have nicer interpolation than the bezier curves. Thanks for the suggestion on the numeric input for the sliders! We had the suggestion to allow the user to decide weather he/she wants the sliders in the n-panel or over the vehicle. Having values shown on them would be great here too. Thanks for the support and I hope you'll find that LC 1.5 already solves many of the lacks LC had. We are excited to keep developing this tool! :)

[@NovaPulseEcho]

wow awesome , many thanks for this great update

[@DanielVesterbaek]

You are very welcome!!

[@AlexisRivera3D]

One of the best addons out there, I recently bought it :D

[@Chodree]

Best car add on! Seriously good!

[@maxpanysh]

This is cool, great work Daniel!

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thank you Max! So happy you like the update!

[@joywinfernandes]

Heyy bro i have a question is it possible for car to scale up? If so how??while on lainch control

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Hey!! Thanks for the question - I am sorry for the super late reply :( I don't get to check the YT comments often. It's a good question - I honestly don't know 😅 It's not an intended workflow, but maybe you could get away with animating the main "wheelbase" bone. It is not meant to be animated, but it might still work

[@eztutor823]

Boom! You added the Multicar feature!! Finally figured it out then. Nice!!

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thaanks! Super excited that we can finally share this!

[@BluewaterAutoRestorationZurich]

Such a fantastic add on !

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thanks a lot!!

[@navidumardaraz7163]

Hands down an awesome idea put into practice. Words fail to describe. 😃

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Aarh, thank you so much! Super happy to hear you think so!

[@mae2309]

do you have videos on how to rig cars with launch control.... this looks amazing!!

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thanks a lot! Yeah - it took around 10-20 mins per frame, but the scenes could for sure have been optimized more :)

[@Overall4k]

I have a super long road i need to use the adon but i fail to extend the animation to final point.... the car goes super slow due to ling curve and i cant fix the soeed wheel rotation as it moves but at some point it😮 rotates very small and fail to make my car reach to last far point please help Sir i just bought it few months ago

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Hey there! For support questions, please reach out on BlenderMarket or in our Discord - We would be happy to help in there, but we usually miss questions here on KZbin :( It sounds like you would want to use the "User Path" field for this. There you can define the start and end frame and see how fast the vehicle will be travelling from the start to the end of the path. Make sure you are using the latest version of LC to be able to use this feature :)

[@10MinuteEditing]

This add-on is amazing. ❤

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thank you so much!!

[@f-2197]

This update is fire 🔥🔥 Best car animation addon

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thank you so much man!!

[@daveson3D]

another question, can the vehicle stay in one place but have the ground move instead of the vehicle and have the vehicle react to the ground?

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Yes, you can do that as well. The physics would still respond to the ground even if the ground is "pulled" under the car instead of the car moving across it. :)

[@LukeDZN]

please can you teach me how to do a perfect loop animation with the drift 01 present animation, i'm learning so much with your videos thank you so much

[@mae2309]

question. is there a way to animate the car with launch control but WITHOUT using Splines as a path follower? I mean it would be a hussle to always do splines... do you have the ability to animate FREELY? just like MadCar or craft director studio for 3DMax... overall it loos fun to play with... cheers

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Hey man!! Thanks for the question - Right now LC is spline based, which means you would need a spline in there for the car to follow. We have had a lot of requests for a "sandbox mode" where the user can "drive" the car instead, but I don't know when or how we would implement that exactly. :) Cheers!!

[@matthiasb6946]

Thank you very much for the video! Can you make another video for Unreal Engine?

[@DanielVesterbaek]

You are very welcome! I might do more videos on UE and LC in the future, but I made a few in the past that covers this :)

[@adhmalmdhigy9006]

BRO CAN U MAKE A VIDEO OF USING THIS PLUGING IN VFX SCENE PLZ

[@magnix2053]

Hi. Addon is amazing the only problem I have is sometimes my car as it follows the spline it jumps up for a split second on a certain part of the spline. Do you know what could be the issue?

[@daveson3D]

this looks awesome, might just switch to blender and buy this just for this tool. How far can the vehicle stray away from the path while jumping?

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thanks for the question! Heheh, go for it! :D (My biased opinion) During jumps, the physics take are of the "height" the car is flying in. So it can stray far away from the path. However, it will only move up and down on the z-axis during jumps - It doesn't allow the car to fly to the side or flip around during a jump (unless it is "forced" to do so due to the shape of the path).

[@andreybagrichuk5365]

What an exellent tool, Daniel. Thank you a lot for development and your passion to product. One question from my side. Can you please say how can we bake car with animation to the fbx siquance and save separately for use later in different scenes for different CUT-s ? Our problem is that we need render our with deadline and deadline not recognise phisics

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Hii! Thanks a lot for your message in here :) I would avoid exporting to FBX if you want to bring it back into Blender. Blender doesn't handle FBX import with animation so well. Instead, I would select the "body, wheel and brake objects" and use the "Bake Action" function in Blender with "Visual Keying", "Clear Constraints", "Clear Parents" turned on, which will bake everything including the physics to keyframes. Sometimes it can cause wheels to spin backwards if the car is going very fast, but other than that it works pretty well as an alternative to exporting an fbx. Would this maybe be a possible solution?

[@WillFalcon]

Hi, nice addon, but didn't find how to make lights?

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thanks a lot, Will!! Depending on the version you have installed, you will find it inside the "Manual Gearbox". Let me know if you got to find it and got it to work! :)

[@WillFalcon]

@@DanielVesterbaek hi, found it, cycles only unfortunatelly, thank you

[@giorgiokropiridze5994]

That's so fire!! i can't enable physics, what can i do? " Please " Enable physics" before adjusting the Physics | Post FX. Thanks

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thank you so much! My guess would be that it might be because the vehicle you are using was rigged in an earlier version of LC. If the vehicle is rigged and then the add-on updated afterwards, some features won't be available for that vehicle. The best thing to do is to re-rig the vehicle with the updated version of the add-on.

[@mahdi_Nowruziani]

Nice🔥 , that's incredible

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thank you so much!!

[@ExoticCrickett]

great but if u added later controller option it would be great, setting all this lines it would be better if car would automatically interact with rigid bodies and do suspension and stuff on its own

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thank you so much for the suggestion! Next step for us is to add some nice tools for making the keyframe animation workflow faster. It would of course also be cool to be able to control with an input device, but it doesn't really align with the core of the add-on, which is about "art direction" and "iteration". The vehicle animation tools that depend on an input device are super cool to work with (take RBC for instance - a great tool!), but it is very different from LC as it's hard to direct the motion of the vehicles. You will find yourself "recording" the motion over and over and over trying to get it exactly like you want it. You also cannot iterate in the same way as when you use a spline-based workflow. LC takes the opposite approach, letting the artist have full control and only uses the physics for secondary motions.

[@sahdsalmi3935]

Hey amigo can we do slo mo with this addon?

[@natasfresas]

Wow that looks soooo cool

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thank you so much!!

[@cgbyrobert]

Cool. Are you locked to a drive path or could you connect it to for example an xbox-controller and stear it in realtime?

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thanks!! Launch Control is a spline based animation tool, so you will always need to use a path to animate the vehicle along. In Blender you have a few different ways of making the paths - If you have a road mesh you can extract an edge loop from it and make it a path, you can draw with the pen tool in the viewport and it will create a path from that, or you can place points in 3D space, which is the most manual way to do it.

[@THSV275]

Wow, this addon is a game changer. Is there a team license available?

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Heheh, thanks a lot, Teodor! ^^ There is for sure! :D

[@ياسرالساعدي-ل7ب]

How can I change the size of the car (increase its size) without manipulating the size of the environment?

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Hello there! Sorry for the late response to this. For support questions, please reach out on BlenderMarket or in our Discord - We would be happy to help in there, but we usually miss questions here on KZbin :( You can change the size of the car if you go into "garage mode", then enter "Pose Mode" and drag the handle called "bone_setup_wheelBaseHandle" around. :)

[@pascalriekenberg8087]

Great tool, many thanks! Where did you get the RC-Truck model?

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thanks a lot! You can download the model here: 3dsky.org/3dmodels/show/hsp_monster_truck

[@theboardsreport]

I just purchased Launch Control will it be compatible with blender 4.2?

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Hey there! Yeah, LC 1.8 just came out a few days ago and it's compatible with Blender 4.2 :)

[@theboardsreport]

@@DanielVesterbaek Thanks for your reply.How do I update

[@DanielVesterbaek]

@@theboardsreport You can update by going to BlenderMarket or GumRoad (depending on where you bought it) and find your order in there. There you will find the latest files for LC :)

[@creativedome2342]

Love the plugin! Are you planning to add motorcycles?

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Aarh, thank you so much :) Happy to hear! We have gotten a lot of requests for that. It's not something that is planned yet, but we definitely want to consider it in the future

[@IamNova-k6i]

What about the multi Axel vehicle like trailers

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Heey! Thanks for the comment! Right now we don't support something like that. We are considering it for the future, but it's not planned yet. :)

[@InfraredVisuals]

Awesome stuff.

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thanks!!

[@UnchartedWorlds]

will this work on a large truck model?

[@DanielVesterbaek]

LC is built for 4 wheeled vehicles, so it would only be able to rig trucks with that amount of wheels for now :)

[@UnchartedWorlds]

@@DanielVesterbaek sounds good 👊

[@ScopedByFishy]

Dave is a g

[@eriksteinmeier6592]

where is the customer help for this product???

[@simsimsim-n2t]

which kind of enviroment did u use? nice lighting and shadow!

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thanks a lot!! I just found a model on 3Dsky.org of the skate park and then I use "Physical Atmosphere" to make the lighting :)

[@antoonsorg]

I have just purchased the update.1.5.

[@DanielVesterbaek]

That is awesome! Thanks!

[@ohandjaalain]

salut bro j'aime ton contenu comment faire pour avoir launch control beginner j'ai le 1.5 mais je ne suis pas satisfait

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Hey man! Thank you for the comment!! Hmm, I tried to translate it, but I am not sure what you mean exactly. Are you interested in more learning content for the tool? :)

[@acadgatsu]

Hi, is it possible to animate a car going up a multi-level spiral ramp?

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Hii! Yes! I just did a quick test and it seems to work fine for stuff like this too. Just uploaded a video here for you to see. There is one little trick when it comes to the ground detection, there is one little trick that can help, hehe www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/toc8jxflymiu5o28sgvvj/Spiral_Track.mp4?rlkey=gol3o1rq5dq7hac0vz8mcmas5&dl=0

[@acadgatsu]

@@DanielVesterbaek You rock! buying it today, thank you!

[@MolediesOflife]

look so much fun

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thaaanks! Hehe, I really like to play with it myself!

[@artisthebalint]

Excellent update once again! Launch Control looks better than ever. The new physics and the multiple car setup is insanely good!

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thank you so much man! Very happy to hear. Hope it will be great to work with! :)

[@eriksteinmeier6592]

can't turn pugin on not working.............

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Hello Erik! Thank you for pinging me in here - I tend to miss comments here on KZbin, so please reach out on BlenderMarket or the Discord for support. There we do our best to respond within 24h :) If I remember correctly, I think you also did reach out in there and we got to chat.

[@theromanian8194]

I fucking love it! For the price +3 cars and a driver it's a steal! #blenderheads 😎

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Heheh, awesome! Thanks a lot! Yeah, Sven did great work on the driver Dave, hehe

[@krzysztofskraburski]

there is sooo many bugs looks good on the video but in practice just horrible

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Hey man! Arh, really sorry to hear that is your experience with the tool :( But yeah - We are constantly trying to improve it and we are learning along the way. :) Can I ask what sort of bugs you are experiencing the most? Many times it has to do with incompatible versions. For the future, please feel free to reach out on our Discord or on BlenderMarket - I often miss comments here on KZbin :/

[@darksider0226]

cooooool!!!

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thaaanks!

[@VJPpLuS]

Nice & good😀

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Thanks!!

[@tjake2391]

i need help "Python: Traceback (most recent call last): File "F:\Project\Blender\Plugin\addons\Launch_Control_Addon\launch_control\lc_operators ig.py", line 797, in execute obj["DrivingPath"] KeyError: 'bpy_prop_collection[key]: key "DrivingPath" not found' During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred: Traceback (most recent call last): File "F:\Project\Blender\Plugin\addons\Launch_Control_Addon\launch_control\lc_operators ig.py", line 808, in execute bpy.ops.wm.append( File "F:\Software\Blender\blender-3.6.5-windows-x64\3.6\scripts\modules\bpy\ops.py", line 113, in __call__ ret = _op_call(self.idname_py(), None, kw) RuntimeError: 错误: 'C:\Users\JaKE_12\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\3.6\scripts\addons\Launch_Control_Addon\assets\car_rig.blend\Object\DrivingPath': 不是一个库"

[@DanielVesterbaek]

Hey man!! Oh noo, sorry to see this is happening! :/ It looks like from this code that the add-on got installed with an extra folder. Would you be able to reinstall it using the Blender Add-On interface? When it prompts you to select the file then click the .zip file you downloaded from BlenderMarket or GumRoad. If the file is unzipped or placed inside another folder it won't install correctly. Could you check if this fixes it? :)

[@tjake2391]

i was tossing & turing for a while, find out all setting r default and there is no problem. thanks bro❣ @@DanielVesterbaek