Hi, I’m using Simple Town project by Synty Studios from the Unreal Engine Marketplace. It contains bunch of vehicles, and rigs for them (skeletal mesh, skeleton and physics assets). I’m having trouble making these work.
The physics assets that ship with the Simple Town project seems to be way off. If you open any of the vehicles in PhAT and click simulate, the vehicle will basically explode, its tires don’t keep up with the body etc. I’ve tried recreating the physics assets, but every time I do it and click play, the car has a seizure and flies off.
I’ve tried following the car rigging tutorials and I’ve succesfully rigged a car from the default content packages, but I’m not able to rig any of these vehicles. Every time the car shakes violently and jumps to the sky or falls through the ground or something. From some reading it seems that the root bone might be off, but I’m not sure how to fix this since the content pack doesn’t seem to contain the .FBX files so I could edit them.
Any help would be appreciated. I can also submit additional information or screenshots.
What I basically did was export the cars from UE4 and into blender. Then I deleted the skeleton that was rigged to it and I created a simple skeleton like in the following picture.
In case you don’t know how to rig a car using blender watch this video.
[How to Rig and Setup a Custom Vehicle in Unreal Engine 4 ][3]
I can also send you the blend file and a UE project with a working vehicle in it.
As for the guys over at Synty they are working day jobs and take a while to reply and the are currently working on fixing every vehicle in their packs.
Thank you very much for the answer! I tried to do something like this before, but I had problems with exporting the model to blender and back (also I didn’t know how to correctly create the bones). I have to check the blender tutorial and try this again soon. There seems to be material/shading issues around the wheels on your screenshot that probably occurs because of the blender export/import?
Whew, I got it based on Sutorcen’s answer. It took a while to improve my skills in Blender, but the link in his answer helped a lot. I wrote a following guide for the process, since I had/have to do it quite many times. Any ideas how to simplify the workflow would be appreciated.
Seems like the markup doesn’t like the sub-lists, so the numbering seems a little off.
On UE4, right click on the Simple Town vehicle skeletal mesh, select Asset Actions → Export… → Export to some location
Open blender, clear scene, set units to Metric, scale 0.010 and import the .FBX (import settings: Manual Orientation: X Forward, Z Up)
Select object called Base (2nd level on the hierarchy), press Ctrl+A and apply the location, rotation & scale
Unparent object Base from the outer object (called ST_Veh_Ute_Yellow or whatever), delete the leftover empty object
Delete the bones under Base.001 (press tab for Edit Mode, shift-select all bones, press del, select delete bones)
Rename all stuff. This is not mandatory, but it helps being consistent in the following steps. Rename:
Recreate skeleton. For a blender noob like me this step takes the longest time, tutorial video above is very helpful for this. After you’ve done this for the first model, you can copy-paste the bones from object to object. Amateur quick tips:
Use Edit Mode (click Root, tab). Set bones visible by clicking Root → Properties window → Object tab → Display → check X-Ray. Open Transform panel with N for easier editing of bone locations.
Add single bone for body at location (0, 0, 0)->(0, 0, 1m), rotation (0, 0, 0), Scale (1, 1, 1). Rename it to BodyMain.
Add 1 bone for every wheel, extruding (e) helps. Bones should be inverted (head at wheel position, tail pointing inward to car). Name them as WheelFL etc.
Object tree is now finished. Make sure the bones have the same names as the vertex groups. I added a screenshot of the object outliner for the finished work.
Export the vehicle. Have the following settings on the export screen:
Y Forward, Z Up (this is a weird one, just check that the imported vehicle has the front of the car going towards x axis)
Don’t apply modifiers (seems to help with the broken shading/normals), smoothing: Face, Tangent space checked
Back to Unreal Engine, import the FBX and check the Import Normals and Tangents. After this, you do the normal vehicle rigging, check the documentation for guide
It would be neat if the original armature (bones) could be re-used, I haven’t figured out yet why they’re so small, it might be a scaling issue. Hopefully the content pack will be updated with fixed rigging for vehicles.
Here’s a screenshot of the Blender project outline after following this little guide:
My apologies for these being incorrectly setup. I have just done an update to Simple Town that has the Vehicles Rigged properly. I’m not sure how long these take to Deploy to the store. But keen an eye out.
