well i have the two gears the pedal crank and the one on the back wheel.
i made sure that the teeth grooves were the same size.
there must be a way (path??) where i can make the links of the chain and dup them.
then i need to make them move
http://download.blender.org/documentation/oldsite/oldsite.blender3d.org/166_Blender%20tutorial%20Tank%20tracks.html
could be what your looking for… hope it helps
unfortunately i have not dabbed into the animation and armatures yet but i would think that each link would need a bone (per say) and pivit at the next link… as far as duplicating it, without trying it, that should not be so hard due to a chain is already one link exactly like the next. the links go one wide, one small, one wide, one small, etc… if you creat the one wide and one small then when you duplicate that then the wide (duplicated link) would be on the small side… make sense?
if you dup. the chains in a strait line till it (angled down to the rear gear) reaches the pivit point of the rear gear, then have it do a 180 dup bend. if the teeth of the gear matches the chain that is the question. This is how i would attack it (i am still learning blender). I am sure there are some senior guys who could get a better way.
thanks, i know i am going bookmark this page for the future…
what a great idea!
thanks all
What is an IKA ( no it is not scandinavian furniture)
HAHAHAHA … seriously that’s not that funny … and it would be IKEA anyway .
I think what IKA refers to is Inverse Kinematics Armature . It’s kinda hard to see in the illustrations but it looks like he added an armature bone with an IK constraint in the spoke of the gear (thereby rotating it) .
http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u320/anon125/tank4.gif
temporarily here is a snippet of the tank video he made.
so that is what IKA is
thanks all
If you are making a movie, don’t overlook any good possibility for “cheating.”
Now, the word “cheat,” in this context, is actually a very good word because it refers to something that you’ve been able to do which saved yourself a whole bunch of time and effort… because it was much easier and faster to do and it looked just as good.
My favorite example is the “painted Q-tips” that actually shipped in the first cinematic release of Star Wars Episode One. In a very-brief glimpse of the grandstands (whose occupants had already been shown to you in detail a few shots earlier), the occupants of the grandstand are Q-tips. Your mind “substitutes” the previously-seen detail automagically.
For example, consider a real-world bicycle. The only time when you can actually see that chain … can actually see and notice any details of that chain … is when the detail is being pointed-out to you. In cinematic terms, it is when we [CUT TO] an [EXTREME CLOSE-UP] of the actual chain. That is when you need to model the actual links. In all shots that are from farther away, when the bike is in motion and so-on, such detail is both computationally expensive and visually useless.
The same principle applies, I think, to tank-tracks. In an [ECU] you might well need to see those tracks in all their painstakingly-modeled glory. But for other times … maybe for most of them … you can get away with a curved surface which has a suitable image painted onto it … maybe with a little bit of bump-mapping to add cheap texture. And if the jalopy is whizzing past the camera maybe all you really need is for the drive-wheels to be rotating.