Tank rig tutorial

FRAME POSITION AND ORIENTATION

with this we’re going to calculate the position of the tank’s frame using the position of the wheels (this sounds easy!), and its orientation using the rotation of the wheels axles.

CANNON TARGETING SYSTEM

finally, we’ll be making the cannon’s rig. this one is a piece of cake, we’ll be playing around with some look-at constraints.

Now let’s begin….

We’re going to use this file: tank_rig_start.rar. (right click, save target as) this is a 3ds max 9 version file.

Extract it in your pc and open the tank_rig_start.max file. Here we got a basic tank model: the frame, turret, cannon, a wheel (we’ll clone the others), a caterpillar piece, and the ground. this last one was made starting with a plane with a lot of segments and some noise and wave modifiers aplied to it. Also, we got some red spline objects and two points, they have an important function, we are going to use them as animation controls, the animator will only animate these objects (Just for manual adjustments), and the rig will do the magic!, so, they must be visible and accesible enought to help the animators reconize and select them as soon as they want interact with the rig system. i choose hot red as its color, but you may choice the color you like, preferably a very light and saturated color. We got a spline too, which is going to define our tank’s path, when we finish our rig this spline could be modified as you like, moving, removing or adding vertices.

THE GROUND PROJECTION SYSTEM

How are we going to project our tank to the ground?, there are several methods, some more complex than other, but the one that i’m going to explain right now is one of the most intuitive. The main Idea is to project our wheels’ position using a mesh projection, we can do that using the “Conform” tool. If we have a mesh with one vertex for each wheel, we can project the mesh using this conform, and constraint the wheels’ position to these projected vertices. We’ll be using the conform Geometric/deformable space warp.

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