About Rush Hour

Rush Hour is an AI-powered toolkit for animating vehicles. Using the real-time physics engine of Unreal Engine, an AI driver will pilot a physically simulated vehicle across a spline-based path. You can select a number of different profiles (Racer, Frantic, Slowpoke, etc) and a profile strength to influence how the AI will behave.

Version 1.3.0 (2023/06/21) notes

This update fixes a number of issues and introduces a few new features.

Recordable brake light states

You can now record the state of lights on vehicles such as brake lights, and have them play back in your sequences. This is useful for reducing the amount of manual keyframing you may need to do on an animation.

Manual Driving mode

For easy usage, there is now an included manual driving game mode which can be used to manually drive Rush Hour vehicles.

Resources / Downloads

Input settings for this mode can be found in the DefaultInput.ini file here.

There is a new demo project version available here

Important note on Unreal Engine 4

Unreal Engine 4 support is no longer available with newer Rush Hour versions. If you need UE4 support please reach out to me with your requirements at support@gdcorner.com and I’ll see what can be arranged.

Additions & Fixes

• Enables use legacy friction position on newly imported vehicles
• Templates now expect body bones to be at 0,0,0, not center of body meshes
• Recordable brake lights
  • Works when scrubbing and playing back for renders
  • Other lights should work too, but not nicely exposed or automatic yet. If you look in a recorded sequence you can see the brake lights control a variable bAreBrakeLightsOn. There are other variables you can tweak that will change other lights on the car. Headlights and DRLs for instance. These will be exposed in a better way in a future update.
• Included Manual Driving Game Mode
• Improved vehicle center of mass values
• More consistent behaviour of center of mass across different imported models
• The blender addon has been updated to include the new center of mass behaviour, as such you will need to update your blender addon. You can download the latest version from the Rush Hour Vehicle Toolkit releases page.

Upgrade Notes

Always remember to backup projects and the current plugin version before updating

Previously recorded sequences with the included vehicles will no longer work due to significant changes to the vehicle classes. You will need to re-record any sequences you wish to use.

Known Issues

• Training may need some tweaking
  • Specifically cars that slide more may record too high of a max cornering force
• Physics may need more tweaking
  • Center of masses are taken from similar City Sample vehicles and then tweaked. They definitely feel better than before, but I think there is room for improvement.
  • I don’t want to go to the extreme of completely unrealistic levels of grip as it will limit future work with sliding and handbrakes.