Help with an excavator!

Hi
i have made in blender an excavator for a project i have in my university. But i have this problem. I wanted the excavator to move so i puted some bones and made o short animation of the machine which is realy simple as it shows the bucket and the other parts just moving around a little bit. As this is not so useful for me i wanted to ask if there is a way in blender that i can give commands to the excavator and make it move, or excavate or just change buckets so that i can really show how 3d animation can help in the construction industry. Has this something to do with the game engine and if yes do you think that it will be really difficult to achieve it as i am a blender newbie?
Thanks very very much and sorry for my english!

Hello Sofia and welcome to BGE foruns.

Yes there is! You could use the keyboard sensors inside the “Pac man” button for this (also known as logic button, F4). It is not that difficult.

At the moment we can do animation using bones, ipos and physics and then make it play in realtime using sensors. It would be cool if you try to make your excavator using physics, you can do a search for “hinges”, but it is a little more complicated.:wink:

Please take a look inside the Blender Game Engine Resource foruns, there is a lot of cool things such this: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=56842 (<<< take a look at the logic bricks movie).

I hope that helps. :slight_smile:

I don’t recommend physics if you want to keep it simple. I’ve made a mobile crane with physics, but it took dozens of hours of tweaking with physics and python scripts. Ipos or bones would be much easier.

Has this something to do with the game engine

yes the game engine

and if yes do you think that it will be really difficult to achieve it as i am a blender newbie?

no , it’s too easy , use keyboard sensors and action/ipo actuator and a controller in the logic brick section , it’s simple .

by this you it will be interactive

if there is a way in blender that i can give commands to the excavator and make it move, or excavate or just change buckets so that i can really show how 3d animation can help in the construction industry

commands are given through the logic bricks , and start the game through game > start game .
good luck , and welcome .

Thank you all very much!! I will check ii out!!! :yes:

Hello again!!
I just have another question!
I started working with the game engine so i puted some movements to my excavator with sensors, controllers and actuators without using physics. So now i try to make a wall or just a plane that the buctet of my excavator cannot pass through (just hit). I used physics (also to the bucket) but thinks come more complicated…Is there a simple way to make the wall static (and objects not passing through) or i have to put physics also in the parts of the excavator?
Thanks!

That is indeed tricky because BGE doesn’t support static to static collision. One thing you could do is to use ray sensor on the bucket to detect obstacles. Enable true pulse and invert its output so that when it detects an obstacle it stops motion. The problem with this is that you might have to use multiple rays to cover all the possible movement directions.

Thanks very much!!
Ray sensor works but the problem is that my bucket doesn’t react because it finds obstacles in every other part of the excavator. So i tried giving properties to the objects i want to be the obstacles in my scene (and also puted the same name of the property in the ray sensor) but the bucket still doesn’t react like it doesn’t recognise as obstacles only the objects with the property i gave them. What am i doing wrong? Maybe i have to use a particular type o f property?
I gave 6 sensor rays (for +x, +y,+z,-x,-y,-z axes) to every part of the excavator that moves, then i connected them to an OR controller, and then to the actuators (motions) that every part has. I also writed the name of the property my obstacles have in every ray sensor panel but when i start the game nothing moves…

If you assign a property (boolean is what I use) to each obstacle named ‘obstacle’ or something similar and you have the ray sensor set up to detect only objects with THAT property, then it should work… You may want to enable ‘Ghost’ in the excavator objects that the bucket is reacting with; ‘Ghost’ will make one object able to pass through other objects, although the sensors can still pick them up…