Automaton Vehicle

Create fully procedural vehicle animations!

Automaton is for artists with deadlines

I know you're in a hurry. You already have your vehicle modeled and textured looking beautiful, but what about animation? It's definitely gonna take a while to figure out and setup your vehicle's animation and you've got better things to do!

Introducing Automaton:Vehicle

Automaton:Vehicle is designed to do all the hard work for you. Set it up with a few clicks, decide your vehicle's path and watch it crawl over your terrain with wheel spinning, suspension, automatic steering and more!

Video Tutorials

Automaton:Vehicle Basic Introductory Tutorial

Automaton:Vehicle Intermediate Setup Tutorial

Automaton:Vehicle Advanced Features Tutorial

Automaton:Vehicle Adding Brake Calipers

Automaton:Vehicle Break, Bake and Export

How to use

Preparing your model

Try and use correct dimensions for your vehicle. I like to quickly google the dimensions of my type of vehicle.

Vehicle Dimensions

Set your vehicle orientation so that it follows the Blender standard of pointing in the -Y direction. That is: if you are in front view, the vehicle should point to you.

Front view orientation

Position the vehicle so that the wheelbase is centered. That is: the distance between the front wheels to the scene origin is the same as the distance between the back wheels and the scene origin.

Wheelbase centering

Separate all moving parts. The body and each wheel should be different objects. Do not parent between objects. It is also a good idea to apply rotation and scale in your objects.

Separate moving parts

Set the wheel origins to the center of rotation.

Spin origin point

If the wheel steers, set the origin to the center of the steering angle. This is usually a little bit on the inner side of the vehicle. What ever rotation you add here will be preserved so be sure to leave everything in the correct default position!

Steer origin point

Creating the Automaton!

Start by selecting all moving objects, go to the Automaton tab and enable Automaton:Vehicle. Finally press Create Automaton.

Creating the Automaton

General Settings

You will be presented with the General Settings where we will set a Path and an optional Terrain object. Use the buttons at the right of the selectors to create new path and terrain objects!

Creating the Path and Terrain objects

Object settings

Now we choose how each of the objects will be moving! There are 4 possible animation effects: Translate, Spin, Suspension and Steer.

Let's start by selecting the body object and activating Translate. It will look a little wonky for now but... have you ever seen a car riding without wheels? (:

Body object settings

Now select one of the back wheels and activate Translate, Spin and Suspension. Do the same for the other back wheel.

Back wheel settings

Select one of the front wheels and activate Translate, Spin, Suspension and Steer. Do the same for the other front wheel.

Front wheel settings

You are done! Now play with the Animation control to see your vehicle rally over the bumpy terrain!

Happy clients

"I want to start off saying that I purchased your Automaton:Vehicle addon and it is one of the best and easiest Blender vehicle rigging systems I have seen. I have been playing around with it for the last day and have had really good results!"

Don Felicella, F5 Graphics

Who's behind automaton?

My name is Daniel Salazar. I have been working in the animation industry as a technical artist for over 14 years, always with a passion for Blender. I had the opportunity to participate as rigger in the Cosmos Laundromat open movie and have contributed to Blender with tools such as AnimAll which comes built-in. I specially love rigging and creating procedural animated effects.