Vehicle Rig

Firstly I needed to prepare my model, by using proper naming conventions, deleting history, freezing transformations, centring the pivot, having the 3d model on the grid and making sure it's facing the front, the outliner should look clean and ready to use too. I then created the steering controls for the front of the car, for this control I created a double sided arrow to resemble that it is meant for steering. After placing it in front of the car I named it accordingly, froze it and deleted history. I created a group for the wheels and a group for the car body. Now the wheels are separate from the body I can rig them. The first thing I did was move the pivot point by pressing insert and moving it to the "axle". I then added a constraint with the steering control and the front two wheels allowing it to be turned using the orient constraint.

Next I added the mini suspensions that are on the wheels using the steering controller and renamed it front controller and created a back controller too for the back wheel suspensions. I added a limit to the point constraint so the suspension isn't too unrealistic and keeps a good balance on the rig. the animator can move the back and front controllers up and down to see this effect in motion, and remember the front controller can also steer.

For the wheel spin I decided to create a large car shaped controller that controls all 4 wheels where the animator can simply move it on the Z axis and the wheels will rotate. I used an expression to achieve this which was "groupname.rotateZ=-floor.translateX*(2*3.14)*360;" The final controller I created was the car body roll, this is the main suspension and instead of doing it the complicated way I tried a more simplified method, firstly I created a 4 way arrow controller using CV curve tool and placed it above the car, remembering to delete history and freeze transformations. I then selected this and the car body and added an orient constraints with a very small limit so the suspension isn't too unrealistic to create a main suspension effect. So the animator can move it whichever side they wish front/back/side to side.

For the final touches I rigged the car so the doors can be opened by selecting the moveable door groups in the outliner and you will notice the rotate Y is highlighted red, when rotating the door group the door will open like it should, I moved the pivot point to the front to allow this motion to happen.

I also rigged the window wipers so they can move moved, by selecting their group in the outliner and entering a number in the highlighted Y and Z in the channel box such as -30 for the left and right wiper. To create this I made a new group (ctrl G) and place all the items in there and change the pivot point to allow for a realistic rotation motion for the wipers to become movable and good for animation.

If I had more time I would have liked to have done the lights, turning them on and off and also made the windows move up and down, and made it so the boot and front bonnet could open up.