Perfect Automotive
Animation in Sequencer.
No Simulation. No Frustration.

True Ride Rig is a C++ plugin for Unreal Engine 5.7 that lets you animate cinematic car shots directly in Sequencer. It’s built for artists doing automotive commercials, product films, cutscenes, and previs — not for gameplay racing. The core idea: keyframe vehicle behavior with full artistic control while the rig handles believable physics (suspension, weight transfer, drift, steering geometry) underneath. Everything stays in-engine, in Sequencer, deterministic and repeatable across renders.

PRO includes the full cinematic animation system: spring-damper suspension, weight transfer, Ackermann steering, drift with counter-steer and body lean, burnout, 21 movable parts slots, IES headlights, RectLight brake lights, auto lights, tire tracks decals, per-wheel Niagara VFX data, and MetaSounds-ready audio data interface. One seat.

STUDIO adds three production features on top: deterministic cache (bake physics to a data asset for frame-perfect repeatable renders), animation export to FBX/Alembic/USD/USDZ, and priority support. Five seats included.

If you work solo and stay inside Unreal — PRO is enough. If you’re in a small studio, hand off animations to Houdini/Maya/Blender for VFX, or render on a farm where deterministic playback matters — STUDIO.

Copy the TrueRideRig folder into your project’s Plugins/ directory, open Unreal Engine 5.7, enable the plugin if it isn’t already, restart the editor. The DLLs are pre-compiled — no Visual Studio needed, nothing to build. Installation takes about 5 seconds.

The launch version targets Unreal Engine 5.7 specifically. The plugin is compiled for 5.7 binaries. Older versions are not supported on launch. If there’s enough demand for backports to 5.6 or 5.5 after launch, that’s something to consider for future updates.

Three minimum requirements: Separate the wheels from the body — wheels are a separate mesh, body is a separate mesh. Optionally separate the brakes. Wheel pivots must be perfectly centered. Merge each part into a single mesh with material slots. Position everything at 0,0,0 facing positive X. The plugin assumes this orientation because it mirrors the right side of the car to the left automatically.

Yes, any custom car model works. No bones. No constraints. No armatures. No pre-animated FBX. You bring static meshes — body plus four individual wheel meshes (optionally brake calipers) — and the plugin handles all the animation logic in Unreal. The plugin sets pivots, mirrors sides, calculates wheel rotation, suspension, steering, body roll, weight transfer, and movable part hinges automatically.

Distance Traveled lets you keyframe the exact distance along the spline in centimeters. Best for commercials and shots where the car must hit a specific position at a specific frame.

Speed Based lets you keyframe target speed in km/h or mph. The plugin calculates distance over time automatically. Best for motion design shots and lifestyle content where natural acceleration and braking matter more than exact positioning.

Same rig, different workflow. Switch between modes per shot.

Set VehicleWeightKg in the Body Physics category to the actual weight of your car (1500 kg default for an average passenger car, ~2200 kg for an SUV, ~900 kg for a light sports car). The plugin auto-calibrates spring stiffness, weight transfer forces, pitch and roll frequencies based on that weight.

If the result still feels off, adjust SuspensionStiffness (lower = softer, higher = stiffer) and BodyTerrainSmoothing (0.5–0.75 looks best for most scenes). For 90% of shots, those three parameters get you 90% of the way.

One slider in the Driving Animation category: Drift, range -90° to +90°. Set a value and the wheels turn into the slide, the body leans appropriately, counter-steer kicks in automatically. Keyframe it in Sequencer to choreograph entry, hold, and exit of a drift sequence.

Two multipliers fine-tune the look: DriftCounterSteerMult and DriftBodyLeanMult. The system uses spline curvature lookahead to anticipate corners, so counter-steering responds naturally. No simulation, no physics solver — pure parametric control. Frame-perfect, repeatable.

The headlight component accepts two types of inputs: IES Light Profile (.ies file) with true photometric data, or Texture2D for projection patterns. Five bundled IES profiles ship with the plugin: Modern LED, Xenon HID, Halogen, Fog Light, and Punctual.

You can adjust position, rotation, intensity, color, cone angle, and radius. By default headlights are mirrored — disable Mirror Headlight for asymmetric setups.

Movable Parts are anything that opens, closes, lifts, slides, or rotates: doors, windows, hood, trunk, seats, backrests, steering wheel, plus four extra accessory slots. 21 dedicated slots in total.

Each part uses a 0-to-1 animation value, keyframeable in Sequencer. Each part has a Mode (Hinges for rotation, Sliding for translation), a Pivot Offset set with a real-time gizmo, and a Max Angle or Max Slide Distance. Parent-child cascades are built in. The steering wheel rotates automatically with the car’s steering input.

Yes, anything you want to animate independently must be a separate mesh on import. Doors, hood, trunk, steering wheel, seats, backrests, windows — each one a separate static mesh. Pivots don’t need to be perfectly placed in Blender (the plugin handles pivot offsets in-engine via gizmo), but the geometry must be separated.

The plugin casts a ray downward per-wheel every frame to detect ground position and surface type. You can choose between Sphere trace or Line trace, set the radius and length, and optionally enable debug visualization.

The two-tier physics architecture decouples terrain from body dynamics: VehicleBase inherits raw pitch and roll from ground traces (wheels always touch the surface), while BodyPivot inherits only momentum-based effects on top. The car never clips through terrain while still delivering film-grade body dynamics. Works on landscape and static geometry alike.

The plugin reads Unreal’s Physical Materials and detects the surface type per wheel each frame (asphalt, dirt, grass, snow, gravel). That data gets pushed to Niagara as a SurfaceType parameter.

In Niagara, you can branch behavior based on surface: small smoke on asphalt, big dust on dirt, white particles on snow. One Niagara system handles all surfaces. The system also affects tire track decal appearance and can drive procedural audio variation via MetaSounds.

Yes, the plugin includes an AudioParameterComponent that pushes per-frame vehicle data to MetaSounds. When you enable Audio Data in the VFX category, the plugin streams values like engine RPM, throttle, brake input, slip amount, and wheel speed to your MetaSounds graph.

The plugin doesn’t include a MetaSounds engine system out of the box — you build the audio graph yourself. The plugin provides the data feed.

The cache system solves a specific production problem: physics calculations can have microscopic frame-to-frame variations between previews and final renders, especially on render farms. The cache eliminates it.

Workflow: finalize your shot, click Bake Cache, the plugin samples the entire physics state frame-by-frame and writes it to a Vehicle Cache Data Asset. Enable bUseCache and the rig plays back recorded values exactly. Every Movie Render Queue pass produces identical output. You can edit anything after baking (turn off cache, tweak, bake again).

After your shot is finalized, open the Export category, choose a format, set the frame range, specify output path. FBX exports geometry with keyframes (best for Maya, 3ds Max). Alembic bakes geometry per frame (best for Houdini, VFX pipelines). USD uses timeSamples and GeomSubsets (best for Omniverse). USDZ is packed USD for AR previews.

Material slot names are preserved across formats. Recommended workflow: Bake Cache first, confirm playback, then export.

Yes. The editor viewport gives you live preview during Sequencer scrubbing, and Movie Render Queue handles the final output. With cache enabled (STUDIO), MRQ renders are deterministic across multiple passes and render farm machines.

Three things to check: Wheel mesh assignment — confirm the wheel mesh is assigned in Import Setup. Ground Trace ray length — increase Trace Length for tall vehicles or steep terrain. Terrain collision — the terrain or static geometry must have collision enabled for raycasts to hit it.

One-time purchase via Fab. PRO is $179, STUDIO is $549. You own the plugin permanently for the version you bought. Future patches (1.0.x) are included free. Major version jumps (2.0+) may be paid upgrades but this is not planned for at least 12 months.

PRO is a single-seat license. STUDIO includes 5 seats — useful for small teams sharing the tool within one studio.