Animated tank track Teeth.

GIS3000 · Dec 2017

Hi everyone,

Has anyone seen this video tutorial on Marmoset animation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFHQwxDP-RM

Notice that the tank track teeth are animated by animating the scrolling track texture. How is this done? Displacement? Are there also other methods?

thanks for your time.

GIS3000

fatihG_ · Dec 2017

Without paying too much attention to the video, it looks like it is using a simple alpha mapped poly strip, that gets animated along with the tracks.

It looks pretty thin, so that is why I think it isn't actual geometry.
They could have used a parallax occlusion shader as well, as I noticed they have a height map in there.

The parallax occlusion could help with giving them depth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ8N0U07b6E

GIS3000 · Dec 2017

Thanks for the input.

That's the strange thing to me. The teeth look like simple alpha mapped poly billboards. But they animate according to the texture scrolling! Weird.

I understand the parallax map part. It is after all a texture.

Could it be possible that the poly billboard is attached to the texture? Sounds rather outlandish to me.

Can anyone else give their opinion, please?

thanks!
GIS3000

throttlekitty · Dec 2017

At 6:20 or so you can see his maps on the right and that he's using Marmosets Height for displacement.

As for the animation part, he also talks about how it's done- by setting keyframes on the UV offset. The texture itself doesn't move, the UVs do (well, the offset does, but that's a minor point).

.Wiki · Dec 2017

GIS3000 said:

Can anyone else give their opinion, please?

As throttlekitty already mentioned it was done with displacement inside toolbag.

Here´s another approach which does not use displacement, but alpha-test instead:

https://wiki.warthunder.com/index.php?title=Creating_a_3D_tank_model#Tracks

GIS3000 · Dec 2017

thanks for the input everyone.
BTW, Isn't displacement a little on the expensive side?

Thanks.

throttlekitty · Dec 2017

It can be, there are two ways to do it. One is a simple height map moving the existing vertices, terrain in games is commonly done this way. The second method/half of this is to tessellate or subdivide the model as well, which is where it gets expensive. This is why most games use parallax maps instead, since it's cheaper to do in a pixel shader and not mess with verts at all.

Animated tank track Teeth.

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