Hi Ed,
I've approached this problem a bit differently over at Fluid because
there are still a few limitations that aren't so much fun in that
approach.
I'll try outline it briefly. Create the path as it's done in that
tutorial, but then create a straight line (with quite a lot of detail
- using the fit to curve creation tool) of the same length as the
track. Also be sure to put enough detail in your track that you can
animate the shape using some clusters with centers - create these on
your track path.
Now create your first track piece - constrain it to the straight path.
Duplicate as many times as you require and open a shared copy of the
path constraint (may need to use the ghosty eyes mode and select all
your duplicates). In the % put it to l(X) where X is the (N/(N+1))*100
with N being number of track pieces you have.
Now deform the straight path (which you should have kept along a
single axis - oops should have mentioned that earlier) to your track
path. You'll probably need to set up vectors and other fun things to
make sure that your track pieces face as expected all the time, but
now you can just animate the translation along the curve to make the
tracks turn. You could set this with a link similar to Manny's
approach, but considering it's just the one parameter you may as well
leave the animator to work with this as he can easily work with it to
do a turning tank etc rather than being confined to a single axis.
Now remember the clusters with centres created earlier? Animate those
and your track pieces will flow along that path. So now you're feed to
add wobbling slack to the middle of the track, or have it bend with
uneven terrain or whatever you like rather than being confined to a
perfect, static track.
It worked really nicely for us on a couple of jobs - hopefully it'll
be useful to someone else.
Cheers,
Alan.
On 7/6/07, Ed Harriss <Ed.Harriss(at)altroutestudios.com> wrote:
I just saw this over at XSIBase. Thought I'd point it out. It's a video showing how to animate tank treads in XSI:
Avi:
ftp://ftp.softimage.com/outgoing/MANNY/tank_tracks.avi
Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLlwngdtNF4
Original post:
http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=11;action=display;threadid=31423
Thanks to Manny Papamanos for this one.
Enjoy,
Ed Harriss
XSI Stuff: http://www.EdHarriss.com
Do you need a CG job? http://www.GetA3DJob.com
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