Madgoat Studio - Cinematic Aircraft Rig

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Feature update V1.2 released, check the change log
User Art: 1 | 2

Why You Need This

  • Aircraft are easy and hard to animate at the same time. If you want, you can animate their transform or animate them on a camera rig rail and call it a day

  • If you want to animate more professionally, you can step ahead and add rotating propellers or jet engines. If you can animate the wing and tail parts, good for you. You can add some turbulence for air bumps on top of your animation cause aircraft never fly steady, and now, you look at your sequencer and see many tracks and keys

  • Now think about modifying a part of the animation and dealing with all those keys. I don’t want to be there…

  • If you are thinking about drivable aircraft and recording the animation using the take recorder, I don’t feel that as an animator, you’re on the right track

  • So what if I told you that a physics-free rig can do all these automatically and you only need to care about when your aircraft is where? That’s exactly what we have here

  

What You Will Get

  • Set up and animate planes, helicopters, drones, hot air balloons, gliders, parachutes, spaceships, rockets, etc.

  • Aircraft can be animated on a spline path or freely

  • You can add as many propellers/rotors/blades as you wish

  • You can add as many wheels as you wish

  • You can add as many ailerons, elevators, and rudders as you wish, and they'll work automatically

  • Perform barrel rolls and vertical loops

  • Add roll, pitch, and height vibrations to simulate turbulence noise

  • You can visualize everything in the editor and the sequencer and you don’t need to simulate

  

Spline Blueprint

  • This system includes a spline path blueprint that the aircraft can follow and fly on

  • You will key the distance traveled from the start of the path

  • Reverse spline path direction with a click

  • Close the spline with a click

  • The aircraft goes back to the start if the distance traveled is greater than the length of the spline path

  • Read the length of the spline in centimeters

  

Demo Content

  • Two demo rigs with exclusive meshes, a plane, and a hot air balloon were included in the pack to demonstrate the capability and diversity of the rig. More demo rigs will be added in the future

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This review of the Cinematic Aircraft Rig is written by someone with extensive experience filming live action air-to-air, and aerial (of ground, cars, boats, etc.,) film and video.

I was looking for a better tool than the cine rail rig and spline path(s) to animate various flying machines, from helicopters to jet fighters, in Unreal Engine.

Without a doubt I found that better tool in the Cinematic Aircraft Rig, from @MadgoatStudio.

First, understand the limitations: This works with static mesh models only (as I write this), not skeletal meshes. Out of the box it won’t animate your model’s retractable landing gear or trigger an animation of the gear going up/down, if your model has one. There are work arounds for these limitations.

However, once you prep your model for use with the rig (convert a skeletal mesh to static), the Cinematic Aircraft Rig is a fantastic tool that will make it so much easier, and faster, to create realistic, or fantastic, animations of airplanes, balloons, helicopters and such.

Here is probably the best part: MadGoatStudio

I have rarely found the level of excellent support from any business or vendor I’ve worked with in many decades of professional life. He is amazing. It is clear he wants his customers to succeed and achieve their creative goals. He is patient, helpful, and in my experience, incredibly fast and detailed.

Just to be clear: I paid for my Cinematic Aircraft Rig, and, I am not being compensated in any way for this review. In fact, my project completed before this review feature even unlocked. I just want to be sure others know how great a guy MadGoat is because he deserves it.

If you need to animate flying machines in Unreal Engine, definitely take the Cinematic Aircraft Rig for a spin. It is a fantastic tool and reasonably priced. Plus you get one free MadGoat with your order, and he is great!

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