Tank rig tutorial

First, we are gonna clone the wheels, this is for helping us to define where the mesh’s vertices are going to be. Then we’ll work only with one wheel.

Select the frame and the Wheel (the big one) and hide unselected. Copy the wheel in the same place (ctrl+V) select copy in the dialogBox and press OK, then without unselect this copy, place it to the oposite side of the frame shifting its x-position from negative to positive value (this is to make sure its position is exactly oposite). Then, Select these both wheels and drag-copy them to the lower side of the screen, calculate a short distance from the first wheels, having in mind we’re going to have 5 wheels each side along the frame. In the Clone Options Dialog select 4 in the Number of copies spinner.

Now let’s create a 4 length segs by 1 width seg plane. Before draw it into the viewport, configure the snap tool to snap to pivots. Right click over the Snaps Toggle button, in the Grid and Snap Settings Dialog check Pivot. Now, Hide the frame and from the top view create the plane snapping from the top-left wheel to the bottom-right wheel. Name this plane as ProjectedPlane.

Set zero the plane’s z-position, the plane now is in the bottom of the wheels. Also add a shell modifier to it with zero in the Inner and Outer Ammount. without this modifier the projection isn’t going to work, because the conform space warp doesn’t conform open meshes.

After this, we’re gonna work over the first wheel, delete the rest of them. It seems like a waste of time make the copies and then delete them. But, they were useful to define from now the wheels’ position and enabled us to create the projected mesh without having any future troubles with its vertices position.

Create a point helper with size of 0.3 and the display form that you like, i choose box.

Snap it to the first plane’s vertex (the vertex where the first wheel is going to be constrained), as we did before snaping to pivots we can do the same snaping to vertices, Name this helper as “Helper_Attached_01”, this point will help us to constraint the wheels to the plane’s vertices. It’ll be attached to the plane’s vertex using an attachment constraint, this controller attach nodes to mesh faces, but we can use it as a vertex attachment constraint just defining the point’s position over the face.

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