Animating tank tracks

[canadair]

Hey all,

I was digging through an old hard drive this eve and found the following tutorial on animating tank tracks. I guess I liked it so much I downloaded and stored the page - which seems nowhere to be found online anymore. So I've posted it on my site and you can determine if it's usefull or not. Thanks to whoever did this originally.

http://www.glenoomen.com/tutorials/Noir_org%20-%20Creating%20Tank%20Treads.htm

It does do some funny stuff if I recall. I had my suspension riding along a bumpy path to simulate the tank cruising over rough ground and every time the path that the tracks are constrained to went concave (as opposed to convex) the links would invert or flip. Again, they would flip if you put a droop in the tracks along the return rollers. A heck, you guys might find it handy.

Have fun,

G

[krazycolin]

if you place the spline so that it's already concave, then you won't have that problem.. you will, however, have the problem of the tracks scaling smaller and therefore running into each other...

[canadair]

I'll have to try this again, I found it about 3-4 years ago (surely someone's come up with something better or improved it in the meantime?!).

If I recall, it didn't do anything to the individual track links in terms of scale. It occasionally "popped" them off each each other, in which case each link should have it's origin set to where it connects with the previous track. Just that darned flipping or inverting. Fine if you're modelling a MarkV with no suspension, but say you want the tank to cruise over debris and have the wheels - and tracks - respond...

I'll give it a whirl in a few days hopefully.