How To Add A Tank Tread In Blender - Without Deforming The Links

hey everybody welcome to level pixel level the other day one of my patrons asked me how to make a tank tread without deforming the treads so here i have a simple tank tread if i just turn off these modifiers you'll see that it's just a single piece right here and then i've added an array to it with a fixed count so i can increase or decrease this and then i can turn on a curve modifier around this curve object that i have right here which is actually pushing those little tank tread pieces and this is a great method for something cartoony but you will notice that the tank treads actually deform around the curve which might be fine for more of a cartoony style but isn't really something you'd see in a realistic rig so i'm going to show you really quickly how to get the exact same results without having this deformation around the curve so i'm going to use something called instancing and blender it used to be called duplifaces in 2.79 but in 2.8 it's called this instancing option right here i'm just going to show you a really quick example of how to use instancing before i do the full tank thread but i'll leave a link in the description if you just want to skip ahead to that part okay so i'm going to add a sphere to my file and i'm just going to turn on x-ray up here so i can just add a monkey as well too so i'm going to add mesh monkey i'm just going to grab my sphere and actually just scale it up really quickly and i'll grab the monkey shift click on the sphere and do control p object so now the susan head is a child of this sphere now select the parent object the sphere in this case under the object tab under instancing i'm going to turn on faces and what this does is it'll instance the suzanne head to every single face on this object the nice part about this is if i just add more faces it's going to get that instance as well i can extrude this and it's just going to keep instancing i use this technique for a lot of things but it's just an option blender that not a lot of people know exists and it's something that i do use frequently when building complex models there's also an option to go to vertices here although you don't get rotation data with that so i'll flip back to faces if i actually rotate this i'm getting the rotation of the object now again i can deform and scale this but the object itself is not deforming it's more like it's just sticking to the plane and getting its rotation from the normal every instance is getting its location from the center of the plane and then it's getting its normal direction from that point as well too okay so let's get back to how this relates to tank treads and the other one i gave the actual tread itself the length the modifier of the array and the curve and that had it going around the curve in a nice way but it was also deforming around the curve in this case i'm just going to add a plane and i'm just going to take the tread i'm going to shift click on the plane and i'm going to control p at the object level so now this will move around that tread i'm going to do one more thing though i'm going to come to the object tab again and under instancing i'm going to flip it to faces now nothing's really changed here but i do have an instance on that face what's really nice about instancing is it also updates with modifiers so if i come to the modifier and add an array i can now increase the steps on this array and get this instancing so i'm going to make it 22. one other really cool thing about this is i can now come to edit mode and grab these two points here just drag them back and i can actually adjust it so my links actually work that's looking good right there now i'm going to add that curve modifier back in and i'm going to point it to my curve in the file and here i have it following the curve but it's now a static link meaning that it's not deforming around the curve the parent of the object carrying the instancing is actually going around the curve and now i can move that on the x and get that really nice rotation now you might look at this guy and think that this might show up in your render though so let's just try that really quickly i'm just going to add a camera and i'll just render this and notice that it does not render once it becomes an instance object it actually hides from render and only shows up on the instances themselves anyway let me know what you think of this shoot me a message in the comments if you have any questions and a big thank you to my patreons for supporting me in this video it's because of you guys that i can continue to make these videos head over there if you want some exclusive content some early access and i do answer a lot of people's questions there as well and they can also suggest future videos like this one talk to you next time bye you

Channel: Level Pixel Level

Views: 26,787

Keywords: 3d, rigging, modeling, surfacing, grease pencil, blender, blender 2.8, tutorial, blender 2.8 tutorial, rigging tutorial, level pixel level, level, pixel, cg cookie, blender guru, creative shrimp, blender nation, best rigging tutorial, amazing, new cg, grease pencil rigging, machine making, robotics, robots, game development, game vlog, game dev, indie dev

Id: lfnfwrmMfJc

Length: 4min 45sec (285 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020