mschoenhals Posted January 7, 2009 Share Posted January 7, 2009 Hi all, I want to create a simple action to place on a treadmill model so that the treads rotate around. Unfortunately, the treads are not perfectly round so using muscle mode and rotation isn't going to work. Any ideas for me? Thanks, Mike Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
heyvern Posted January 7, 2009 Share Posted January 7, 2009 There is a topic on the forum about doing tank treads which would be the exact same thing. Do a search for that topic. It might help. I don't quite understand what you mean by "not perfectly round". You mean the round parts at the ends of the treadmill? That might be tricky. The tank tread technique I saw didn't use any muscle mode animation, just bones and constraints. It might have used path constraints. -vern Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HomeSlice Posted January 7, 2009 Share Posted January 7, 2009 I think the topic was started by Entity. He was using Distortion Boxes to animate treads. Also worked with asymmetric treads. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nimblepix Posted January 8, 2009 Share Posted January 8, 2009 Because a treadmill track is fairly flat, just animate the texture moving around it, not the tread itself. You don't even have to worry about having a seam on the texture because a treadmill has one. You can make the track frames (including a pre blur) in an image editing program like Photoshop. Save the files out as sequential targas or a Quicktime Movie (animation compression) and bring those (or it) in as a texture on your treadmill track. You could have two layers, one for the texture map, another for a bump map. Here's an old file with a moving texture applied. topSpinning01.mov Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mschoenhals Posted January 8, 2009 Author Share Posted January 8, 2009 Because a treadmill track is fairly flat, just animate the texture moving around it, not the tread itself. You don't even have to worry about having a seam on the texture because a treadmill has one. You can make the track frames (including a pre blur) in an image editing program like Photoshop. Save the files out as sequential targas or a Quicktime Movie (animation compression) and bring those (or it) in as a texture on your treadmill track. You could have two layers, one for the texture map, another for a bump map. Here's an old file with a moving texture applied. topSpinning01.mov Hey, Thanks very much all for your help! Really appreciate it! We are going to go with the sequential targas. Thanks once again all! Mike Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nimblepix Posted January 9, 2009 Share Posted January 9, 2009 Cool! I'm looking forward to seeing the results. : ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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