Help w/ "A ride in the mines" tutorial.

Support Basics & Interface
1

2 more questions…

  1. I have tried a few ways to get the below tutorial link to work but am having no luck. I get stuck on making/bevelling out the tracks. Can someone shed some more light on it please? It says…

http://vrotvrot.com/xoom/tutorials/mineRide/mineride.html

"Scale the shape down, and duplicate it. Join the curves together by selecting them both, and pressing CTRL-J.

In the bottom-right of the screen, you can read the object’s name. It’s probably something like OB:Curve.001 (it is for me, anyway). Now select the main path, go to the edit buttons screen and enter the object name you just found in the BevObj: field"

  1. Also, how do I re-centre an objects centre (yellow dot)?
2

I’m not sure if that will help you, but object names are case sensitive. So if you enter “curve.001” instead of “Curve.001”, blender will ignore it.

Select your object and press F9.
Now you should see three buttons:

Centre
Centre New
Centre Cursor

Use “Centre New” if you want to move the object’s origin to the center of the object.

3

Thanks, figured out how to do that, now stuck on the next part with making multiple copies of tracks/objects. Tute says…

"Now, when you animate, you’ll notice the block is following the rails, too. Select the block, and go to the animButtons screen. Select the button called ‘DupliFrames’. This option will create a ‘virtual copy’ of the block for each frame of the animation.

There are a bit too many copies right now. Increase the value of ‘DupOff’ until your rails looks good to you. (I used a value of 2). "

I manage to get duplicates alright but they span the wrong shape and the wrong direction. I have parented object and have it following tracks. Hmmm?

4

I had this problem also when I tried the tut. What I did was scale down the shape that is duplicated along the path (rails) and I had to soften up the curve path a bit because my radius was too sharp of a turn. The location of the rail shape to the path affects it as well. If you would like a copy of my file to compare yours to send me an email at:
[email protected].
-Brian