Video: How does a Tank work? (M1A2 Abrams)

Jared Owen writes:

I wanted to share some behind the scenes from my latest video on how a tank works. The tank treads were done using curves and a over 100 objects on each side for each of the links in the track. This would have been incredibly tedious to do by hand so I wrote a python script to set up the modifiers and the drivers. Then to move the tracks all I need to do is animate a single property. I learned this technique while doing my escalator video last year. Then I used several hook modifiers on the curve – this way I can animate the tracks going over bumps and obstacles. I am wondering if there’s a better way to do this? Either way, this worked good enough for this video.

You can’t have a tank video without some sort of explosion. I’ve used blender’s smoke/fire simulator in the past but it just recently got mantiflow which is a bit different. I still have a lot to learn! I used it for the smoke simulation but I struggled creating a realistic explosion. I ended up faking the explosion with yellow/orange emission shaders and some compositing. Not perfect by any means but I’m quite pleased with how it turned out!