Jennifer Abbott writes:
Did you know you can easily make a tank animation for your project?
In this tutorial I will show you how to use Blender to make a tank track animation.Timeline:
00:00 Introduction
00:05 Getting Started
00:15 Animation Setup
01:32 Animation
03:21 Rendering
I am a CG Environment Artist focusing on environments, props, and textures. In addition, I also work with visualizations, cinematics, and film making. I provide educational materials for the beginners as well as more advanced artists and designers. I also provide game asset packs, and commissioned work for various projects. I am open to working with individuals, and various for-profit and non-profit organizations in order to fill their art and design needs. I became a CG Environment Artist and Level Designer in order to not only pursue my passions but also to assist others in expressing themselves or their business or organization in a creative manner. I believe in creating great design that fits the context and needs of the client.
5 Comments
This process only works if the tank is moving in a straight line. Any solution for having the tank animated along a path?
You can use a curve to make your own path. I've already made a tutorial showing how to do this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EKLumcskgk
MATT (and JENNIFER) I've not downloaded the blend file yet but if it uses the 'curve' modifier then there will always be a problem with the fitting *always* using world coordinates. I don't know of a way round that, however if you use an armature of a chain of bones you can make them 'slide' along a curve using bone constraints such as IK spline. I will have a look at this later and post something on here
Hi Matt and Jennifer, I'm away from home at the moment but I've thought about this and tried a couple of things on my laptop. TLDR; The best solution is to
1. make a 'prototype' curve and track at the world origin.
2. put the curve and track into a prototype track collection
3. make two 'collection to instance' for the left and right track and make them children of the tank body.
Here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mjm8n8UjrskZz_sKHOOh76HxE98_IvVm/view?usp=drive_link is a copy of Jennifer's model that I have done that to, then made the tank body follow a curve
Hi, I've made a video showing how to use collections to allow the tracks to be animated as the tank moves around and rotates: https://youtu.be/Imx9UNtW83g
There's also a more complicated way using an armature which is more flexible and can be exported as .FBX etc https://youtu.be/28OjCwvsCj8