I was considering participating in Rocket League Airshow 2 where people program cars in the game Rocket League to fly around and do tricks and create a video out of that. My idea was to use cars to make a shape of a person doing things.

Here were the high-level steps for doing this:

  • Create a very simple model of a human (very cubic and very few vertices)
  • Use mixamo’s pre-done animations to animate this model
  • Create a few cars (or really any model to represent a car) and add them as constraints to the various bones created mixamo. This allows the cars to move as the character’s bones move.
  • Export out these positions from Blender. I wrote a plugin for Blender output them to a CSV file.
  • Then load that data and use RLBot to move cars to those positions in-game

In the end, I decided not to do the airshow because I thought making a whole video was something I didn’t feel excited about. I still enjoyed the process. I learned a lot about the constraints system while doing the work. Also got more comfortable with writing plugins for Blender.

Work Time: 20 hours