Blender Tank Tracks Tutorial | Modeling & Rigging | Constraints (Arijan)

modeling rigging and animating tracks is not rocket science okay i'm about to show you how i did all three of those and i'm not even gonna waste your time with a bunch of useless information so by the end of this video you're gonna know how to make some tracks and how to animate them on your tank so it can move around just like this first we have the model the sprocket now uh on the m1 a1 abrams tank the sprocket has 11 of these cogs okay if you count them there's 11 of them and this also means that the angle between the separate cogs is exactly 32.72 72 72 72 degrees right which means that we can only make one cog and we can rotate it around the 3d cursor in the middle after we duplicate it and then we get 11 identical cogs on each side of the circle right so that's exactly what we do here we take a vertex and we model one side of this little uh cog here and we just mirror it across the 3d cursor at the bottom to get it on the other side as well now we can adjust those a little bit we're going to add some thickness and then after we do that we can just add a few bevels to finish this thing off now once we made one we can literally just duplicate it around the 3d cursor in the middle and that already gives us roughly the shape that we need now we're just going to take some of these vertices in between and we're going to fill in the gaps and again there's 11 gaps there now if we fill in the face as you can see that's already more or less the shape we need but we want to make it a little bit more detailed so we're going to add some of these holes uh between the cogs right and for that we're just gonna add a circle we're gonna rotate it into place by the way we have to rotate it by exactly sixteen point three six three six three six degrees and then it comes into place there and then now we turn the circle into a cylinder and then we just rotate it around the circle eleven times again under the angle we used before 32.72 7272 degrees so once we duplicate this all around the sprocket we can literally just add a boolean modifier uh apply it to the sprocket and then once we delete the circles or the cylinders you can see we have those nice little dents between the cogs now we're going to add another circle down here and we're going to try to trace the inner shape with the circle right so we're just going to make the circle about as big as that we're going to take half the circle and we're going to copy it to the side and once again we're going to rotate that by 32.727272 degrees and then we're going to make a little vertex in between and just pull it out towards the middle a little bit and add some bubbles to make that smooth little shape between the two semicircles now again if we crop this shape we do the same thing again we rotate it around the middle by 32.72 72 and 72 degrees until we have the full circle now we separate that to a new object and we stretch it out to add some thickness and we can just fill in the faces now we're also going to fill in the faces uh on the sprocket and then we add another boolean modifier to the sprocket and we cut a hole using this shape we just made it's kind of like a clove or a flower or something so we can delete that shape and as you can see now we have the rim for our sprocket now the tracks i made here look quite kind of sophisticated but they're really a pretty simple shape so i have two shapes here i have the main track pad and the little link that connects uh the tracks right so together when we multiply these using an array modifier they kind of fall into place like this but really this shape is just the same as this one here there's uh two separate objects for the actual track and there's three links between them it's just basically uh some planes which have some bevels in the corners i'm also going to run you through how i made the wheels basically just a circle that i extruded inwards and then i added two loop cuts uh in this newly extruded circle and then i just pulled out the faces in the middle outwards a little bit and then i duplicate this across my 3d cursor there so it comes to about half the track a little bit less and then i just bridge the edge loops between the two outer circles so i can fill in the face in the middle in the front i can scale it down a little and i can pull it in towards the middle then again i scale in the face and again i extrude inwards and now you can see i have this hole in the middle of the wheel now let's just add a few bevels and we're also going to extrude the circle in the back inwards a little bit and then we scale it down again we play around with that a little bit and we try to make it look smooth like the picture here and once we do that of course we add some more bevels and then i just made a very simple screw or a bolt in this wheel so i had a circle and then i had a hexagon then add another circle and then i just duplicate that and rotate it around the 3d cursor to have about 10 screws and i do the exact same thing with the other smaller screws which are in the outer rim here then add another circle in the middle and this is going to be the part sticking out in the middle of the wheel i extrude the circle add a loop cut down the middle and i scale down the circle that's sticking out another bevel in this loop cut here and then we take the face at the end and we extrude it inwards a little bit and then we can just extrude that towards the middle and add another bevel there so it has a kind of hole in the nose now we're just going to add another circle here in the middle and we're going to extrude that out and add another bevel so we're going to add a hexagon there we're going to delete the face we're going to extrude the hexagon and push it backwards a little bit and we're going to add loop cuts on each face of the hexagon now the circle around this hexagon is exactly 30 vertices which means if i had enough loop cuts of the hexagon and it also has 30 vertices i can just bridge the edge loops and connect them nicely and we push this edge inwards a little bit and you can see it's more or less the shape that i want i'm also going to add another one of these bolts here in the middle just as a nice little touch then i made this little simple object which i'm not going to explain how i did but it just uh just a plane which is kind of reshaped get this little object here make sure you don't use too many vertices for this one because you're going to duplicate this about 100 million times as you can see here and we do the exact same thing as we did with the screws before we just rotate it around the 3d cursor first we rotated by 180 degrees then by 90 degrees then by 45 degrees then by 22.5 degrees then by 11.25 degrees so now we have one half of one wheel so we're just going to mirror that and pull it backwards a little bit and i'm also just going to add a little cylinder here in the back so this is how the wheel is going to be attached to the suspension of the tank and then you just duplicate these wheels uh as many times as you need this tank has seven wheels at the bottom and another tension wheel here at the top and it also has a sprocket in the back so we place our track right there under one of these wheels and before we do anything else we're gonna add in a path curve and then you can just go ahead and extrude that path curve until you sort of wrap it up around your wheels and make the shape that your track should have now you can play around with this a little bit try to make it so that the curve is equally far from the wheels at any point try to make it look like there's a bit of gravity pulling the tracks and now we're going to get to the fun part now you already knew these are two separate objects the track and the link so we're going to add an array modifier to the track first and we're going to try to adjust it so it's about as far as we want it to be i'm going to add another array modifier to this link in between the tracks and we're also gonna make the same distance on those so they connect uh the tracks on every part and let's just pump those numbers up a little bit so we have enough tracks to go all the way around our path and now we just add a curve modifier to our tracks uh you can see they wrap around the curve nicely now we're also going to add a curve modifier for the same curve to the links and then we're going to parent the links to the tracks that way whenever the tracks move uh the links are going to follow them but the reason the links are separate objects is because then they can have a different angle and on the parts around the tension wheel and the sprocket the track and the link should be pointing in different directions so they're not going to be deformed as much by the curve if you look closely the problem here is that the links are still clipping with the sprocket and this is exactly what we're going to fix next and it's going to be a little bit tricky because maybe you didn't get the measurements for your tracks and your links correctly but that's not a huge problem because you can just play around with the curve a little bit until these links and these tracks fall into place between the cogs and now if i just add more numbers to the array modifier uh the tracks will wrap all the way around and then at the very end you want to zoom in closely uh this part where the tracks are supposed to connect again and you want to make sure that there's no clipping or they're not too far apart for me they're a little bit too close so i'm going to reduce the distance between each track and the array modifier just so uh there's no clipping there we're also going to do the same thing for the links and make sure that the spaces are exactly the same and then finally we can just double check that they fall into place maybe you have to fix up your curve a little bit again you can play around with that as much as you like but don't worry about it too much now you want to make sure that all your objects here have separate names so you can recognize them in the constraints i'm going to separately name all my wheels like wheel one wheel two wheel three i'm also gonna name the tracks and i'm gonna name the track links and the first thing we have to do is add an empty sphere in the middle and we're gonna use the sphere together with some constraints to make it so that when the sphere rotates the tracks are going to move in the appropriate direction so we're going to select the tracks and we're going to go to our constraints tab and we're going to add a transformation constraint now you have to make sure that your target is on world space and your owner is on local space and you also want to check the extrapolate box now i'm going to rename my sphere just so i can find it in this menu here and then go back to your track and for target select the sphere now we're going to open map from and you're going to set that to rotation and then when you go to map 2 you're going to set that one to location when the sphere rotates the tracks follow this rotation but instead of rotating they move their location based on this rotation now for this case we're going to go to a map from and we're going to set the y max to 1 degree now we're going to set our y source axis to x and we're going to set the x maximum to minus 11 meters and now you can see when we rotate the sphere around the x-axis the track moves along in the same direction now that works fine but the problem is this is still clipping through our sprocket because the sprocket is not turning well so in order to fix this we're going to do the exact same thing with the sprocket we're going to make it so that when the track moves the sprocket rotates along with it so we're going to add another transformation constraint to our sprocket and we're going to select our sphere now i can set the owner to local space and check the extrapolate box now in this case we're going to map from rotation and we're going to map to rotation so in the map from rotation we're going to set x maximum to 1 degree and then we're going to set the x maximum to something like 561 degrees now if you try this now you can see that the sprocket turns when we rotate the sphere but it doesn't really match with how the tracks are turning you can see that if we rotate the sphere a little bit the tracks move a lot but the sprocket kind of turns very slowly and then the track kind of catches up with the clock then it clips through so to fix that we can just increase the angle that we have there it might just have to make it more negative so i'm going to play around with the number until i get the right turning ratio now you can never be 100 accurate with this because there's always going to be a slight difference but i usually try to test it out by rotating the sphere by something like 3600 degrees and that way i can tell okay if after 10 full rotations there's no clipping between the track and the sprocket i can be pretty sure that uh the tracks are not really going to clip through the sprocket so what are we going to do about the wheels well we're going to do literally the exact same thing now you can sort of copy the constraints to other objects so that one object has the exact same constraint settings as the other one without you having to go through all the trouble of setting up the axes and the numbers and the angles and everything like that and the way to do that is you select the object to which you want to apply the same constraint and then after that you select the object which already has the constraint that you want to copy to the other object and now with those two selected you go to the object menu you go to constraints and you select copy constraints to selected objects now we're going to copy the constraint from the sprocket to the wheel but the wheel doesn't have the same turning ratio as a sprocket as a matter of fact they turn a little bit slower so i'm going to set the maximum angle there to about minus 705 degrees that's what i figured works for me you can try to play around and see what works for you but it's probably going to be something somewhat close to that and now once we apply that to one wheel we're going to select all the other wheels and we're going to select the wheel that we already applied this constraint to and we're just going to do the same thing we're going to go to objects constraints and copy the constrained data to the other wheels and now when we rotate the sphere you can see all the wheels are moving in unity now we're going to attach this rig to the rest of our tank and we're going to make it so that when a tank moves the tracks move as well so first of all we're going to select our tracks and we're going to parent those to the curve then we're going to select the wheels the sprocket and the sphere and we're going to also parent that the curve and this is when you move the curve around the whole rig moves along with it and then we're going to add another empty and this time we're going to add a cube now we're going to clear the parent from the sphere and we're going to parent that to the cube instead and then we're going to parent our cube to our curve so let's bring our tank down here and attach the tracks of the tank and it's very important that you make sure that your curve is parented to the body of the tank and then we're going to add a transformation constraint to our sphere again and in that constraint we're going to target the hole of the tank and now set the owner to local space and this time i'm going to map from location to rotation we're going to set our y maximum to about 10.9 and our x source maximum is going to be 1 degree and now when we move the tank along the y axis you can see that the tracks rotate as well the problem however is when you rotate the tank the tracks are not moving at all now this doesn't make any sense the tank can't just rotate on its own the tracks need to rotate in different directions in order for the tank to turn right so when the tank turns to the right the track on the left side is going to turn forwards the track on the right side is going to turn backwards and so we can do the same thing using constraints we can make it so that the tracks move also based on the rotation of the tank so we're going to select our cube and we're going to add a transformation constraint and this time we're going to target the curve now again check the extrapolate box and set the owner to local space and we want to map this from rotation to rotation again now this time we're going to set a z minimum in the map from box and we're going to set that to something like minus 56 degrees and we're going to set our x source axis to z and on that we're going to set the maximum to 1 degree now when we turn the tank you can see that the tracks move as well so now if i select my entire rig and that includes the tracks the links the wheels the sprockets the little tension wheels everything as well as the empty sphere and the cube i can place my 3d cursor in the middle and i can just duplicate this and mirror it across a 3d cursor now you want to make sure you flip the normals after you do something like this so with everything selected i'm going to go to edit mode and i'm going to press shift n to recalculate the normals so now finally when we rotate the tank both the tracks are actually moving and it looks like the tank is really moving now if you look closely on the tracks that i just duplicated it seems like they're turning in the wrong direction when we rotate the tank they're both moving forwards and they shouldn't one of the tracks should be moving backwards so to fix that we're just going to select the cube and we're going to go over to our constraint and in the map from box we're going to go to our z minimum and we're going to change it from -56 degrees to positive 56 degrees and that way it just rotates in the other direction based on the rotation of the tank and that's exactly what we need now it's moving in the other direction we turn the tank and it looks realistic now the only thing that still bothers me is that the tracks are moving a little bit too quickly when we rotate the tank and to fix that we're just going to increase the angle in the constraint now you want to make the negative angle more negative and the positive angle more positive it seems a little bit counter-intuitive because you might think if you reduce the angle it's going to move more slowly but no what this means is the tank has to rotate more in order to move the tracks by a certain unit now before the tank had to rotate by 56 degrees to move the tracks by a certain distance now the tank has to rotate something like 80 degrees in order to move the tracks a certain distance now the tracks move more slowly in relation to the rotation of the tank and now your tank is ready to go you

Channel: Arijan

Views: 41,648

Keywords: blender rigging, blender tank track, blender tank, blender rigging tutorial, How to make tank tracks in blender, How to animate tank tracks in blender, Blender constraints tutorial, blender modeling, blender, blender tutorial, blender animation

Id: FlpCAWgMwRs

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021