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Tank Treads


sydtocreation

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I was trying the tut. on the tank treads using a path for them, but when the tread hits the 100% it will travel all the way around the path again instead of continuing on through. I can think of some alternative ways to try and make the tread almost look like they continue through as though to loop, but it doesn't have the smooth motion I would like. Any hints or suggestions would help.

thank-you

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This is a very complex situation... can you supply diagrams or animation or renders showing what you did. I think you are saying that the treads are controlled by bones that travel a path and you change the amount of ease in the animation--- if this is what you mean... why not just leave the treads where they are on the path and animate the position of the path. If you do that in an action, then you could make the action into a cycle (like the walk/wheel cycle tut on the hash site.).You would select the tread that is on the ground and start the cycle there and stop the cycle when that tread is one frame from hitting that same spot after going around the wheels.

But without knowing how you did it, I couldn't give you any advice.

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I should say that the tut. i am following is from this sherwood web site. Its the 'says tredhed' tut. dealing with the ease. On the tut. it seams to suggest that an object can follow around a circular path continuously. I've got my example set up exactly like it (sorry i am unable to provide a example for you). It sounds like you have the general idea from your last response, I don't know about moving the path ( the path is oval like)

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I don't know about moving the path ( the path is oval like)

 

What I mean is to animate the cp's in your path along it's spline.... It does sound hard and I know I wouldn't want to have to do it, but it is just another suggestion. I would pick appart what the tut says and try to find what I'm missing... treadhed was created during version 8 or 9 of A:M... so perhapse there is a step in the tut that you don't need or need to change.

 

anyway it's supposed to start over on 0% after 100% unless your path doesn't have all the splines connected.

 

It could be the timeline: maybe you could change the ease channel spline to a linear interpolation instead of spline interpolation. (Right-click on the spline for the ease channel in the timeline)

Edited by entity
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  • 4 months later...

Sydtocreation: I was working on my own tread project when I saw this. I think I can help.

Turns out the Sherwood Forest Treadhed tutorial you referenced is close to what I was doing in my project. The problem is that version 11 does not allow Ease on a path to go past 100%. I didn't try an older version, but I seem to remember that previous versions DID allow this. (I might be wrong on that.)

 

If all the tread plates are placed on the one spline and distributed around the loop with Ease percentages, then they will all stack up at the end of the action when they all reach 100% and the single end of the single spline.

 

You could trick the eye by not having the same plate go all the way around, but rather only to the next plate position. If you are careful with modeling, and all your plates are identical, then a repeating action with stride length would not show the plates don't really go all the way around.

 

I wanted the ability to have a different colored plate and watch it go around. I ended up construction a path spline for each plate. The spline has at least a control point everywhere a plate origin will be. Each new copy of the path spline was directly on top of the original. With each new loop, I named the group (so I could find it again). Through a process of hiding all but the loop I was working on, you can break and reattach ends and beginnings incrementing the break around the loop. This re-sequences the path loop and changes the position of the first control point (which will be 0% and 100% Ease).

 

I see you posted this way back in August, but let me know if you need more.

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