Vehicle Rigging

Excavator Treads

An area which I hadn’t explored a huge amount but found that I had an increasing demand for was rigging vehicles. Many jobs I work on require the animation of vehicles around a scene, and the current way it was being handled was to key frame each element individually.

This was very counter productive and time consuming when changes were required. So rigging a vehicles wheel movement seemed essential to learn. As a challenge I decided that a excavator would be a good place to start, as it has multiple elements that are all driven together instead of a simple wheel.

 So far I managed to get all the treads working as they should and controllers to drive the movement/scale and rotation. It was a good challenge to understand the principle of correctly naming everything and grouping relevant areas together. Since this project I have used many similar setups to drive vehicle movements, but would like to take this project a step further in the future. I’ve started looking into making the treads interact with geometry (uneven surfaces) and finally getting around to modelling the rest of the excavator.