Tank Treads!
polycounter lvl 10
Hellooooo. I have made some tank treads which can be connected and everything, but please can someone tell me how I can link them together and make them flow around the wheels?
They are sub'd model's so I don't want to use path deform as it deforms the mesh, but I want to animate the wheels and tracks.
They are sub'd model's so I don't want to use path deform as it deforms the mesh, but I want to animate the wheels and tracks.
Replies
Tank treads are some of the harder things I've had to rig up... I ended up using a method similar to Paul Hormis's dynamic chain tutorial to get them rigged up and flowing around a path. It was a bitch and there where a few times I thought about just path deforming it... but at the end of the project it came out awesome and we even used a close up the tread as it went around the wheel.
Paul's Tutorial http://www.hyperent.com/Hyp-Tutorial-Cloth-003.php
I'll see if I have any examples sitting around and if I can post em.
You can weight the path to spring controllers which will add some sag to the threads and will react dynamically as the main tank body moves, they act like jiggle bones and because the path itself never animates they can stay in one place and effect the treads as they animate past those places. Pretty awesome effect.
Using max10 64bit.
http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/136
Same here... best way i could get is to switch to this script. In my opinion it gives you much cleaner results with less headache... of course needs some additional hand tweaking... at least better than train maker script.
But uhmm, just to point it out:
You do not need any of this for realtime stuff. The only way to do tracks for realtime/ingame use without resorting to about 200 bones (bad idea), is to use tiling, scrolling textures. Once you wrap your head around it, it's much easier than this rigging stuff.