Ford Bronco in Unreal Engine 5
One of the most satisfying parts of this sample was allowing for the procedural motion of the Bronco.
This was done via combination of Animation Blueprints and a Control Rig to allow the Bronco to crawl over the rocky terrain following a predefined path.
One gripe I always had with these types of animation prior to the Control Rig feature is that it was fairly challenging to use the Level Sequencer with procedural animation. It was possible by simulating, but this had undesirable consequences when you have additional game logic running outside the sequencer.
Now with the rig, in combination with the lovely little boolean: Update Animation in Editor, Animation scrubbing without playing in simulation mode is much easier.
The meat of the effect here is done via a ray-cast downward on the world Z Axis, for each tire in the animation blueprint. On update, this is being passed into the control rig instance that runs inside of the animation blueprint. I’m also caching the previous location of each tire so that I can do some easing in real-time.
One warning to be aware of is that this specific setup isn’t using a control rig in the sequencer itself. If you want to go that route, its more straight forward but you’ll lose out on the Animation Blueprint evaluation. Honestly, that’s probably the route I should have gone for such a simple effect, but I wanted to round trip the full ABP integration.
P.S. We’re using a slightly more expansive version of the naming convention shown here in our projects.
