Rig My Ride: Automatic Rigging of Physics-based Vehicles for Games 48

We extend the concept of traditional rigging, which links polygonal meshes to an underlying skeleton for 3D characters, to the creation of physics-based wheeled vehicle models directly from surface geometry. Unlike character rigging, physics-based rigging involves assigning joints and collision proxies to animate the surface geometry. We present an automated pipeline that transforms a polygon soup into a physics-based, multi-wheeled vehicle model. The pipeline begins by using text-driven 2D image segmentation to identify vehicle components, which are then mapped onto the 3D mesh. A rough estimate of collision geometries and joint parameters is then used to initialize a rigid body simulation of the vehicle. Then, a numerical optimization refines these parameters in order to produce more realistic vehicle behaviour. The final result is a functioning physics-based vehicle for real-time simulations, which is demonstrated across a variety of vehicles, including cars, tricycles, lunar rovers, and even a semi-truck with 10 wheels.