Hey there… I was on the bus this morning and I started wondering… how would you get a chain on a chain saw to go around the way a chain on a chain saw would… or say tank tracks?
Can anyone point me to a tutorial or something that would work in the Game Engine?
Thanks
M
K… I just did some snooping around and it looks like it’s either a texture with animated UVs or the tracks done on a path and then saving out the animation. I’ll giver a try…
Just answered my own post. Eeesh!
M
maybe with a moving texture, if it isn’t really detailed, or with many objects with many Ipos, I made this but it cost you around one hour,
here is the .blend : CHAIN.blend (859 KB)
Sigh… obviously I’m a bit slow.
Soooooo, if I had an object on a path… and I wanted to save out the animation of the object so that I can then delete the path and use the objects ipo’s… how would I go about this?
Thanks.
M
A moving UV would be the best, but if i were you rather than animating loads of objects, make a single tank track object with a chain shaped bone. also, you only really have to put in 3 keyframes to give the effect that it’s moving continuously, just make sure the last keyframe is exactly the same as your first one
Ya… I’m thinking of just going with the moving UV script thing. I gots me a sinking feeling that you can’t bake out this sort of animation in Blender.
M
Look at this video.
Its funny, because I was working on an animated UV script!
Ill post a blend with it. It works with two “tracks”, and an empty in the middle. The empty deals with all the logic, such as turning and acceleration in the script.
I constructed the script in a not very flexible way, due to inexperience, but hopefully it will work for you.
Things to make sure of when using it are:
Using blender 2.5x.
It would be easy to convert it for 2.49, I think you just need to change the imports, but I would strongly suggest moving to 2.5, the menus make a LOT of more sense and is better overall…
The empty has the properties of:
“yleft” - Float - 0.000
“yright” -Float - 0.000
“topspeed” - Integer - the maximum speed of the moving tracks
“currentspeed” - Integer - 0
“acceleration” - Integer - the accelration value
“deacceleration” - Integer - the deacceleration value
Also, the objects need to be named “track_left” and “track_right” respectivly, and must have one mesh and one material.
The blend file should have these already set up, so no worries there!
Attachments
conveyerFORUM.blend (1.31 MB)
I’ll answer part of my own question. If you have something on a path and you want to bake out the animation, just hit the space bar and type bake. A couple of options will come up. One is Back Action. This worked perfectly for me.
You have to remember to delete the constraint after using it.
M