How to Create Rigged Tank Treads in Blender (Tutorial)

in this blender tutorial I'll show you how to create rigged tank treads and blender so in this video I'll be showing you how to model these Treads and these wheels and then I'll show you how to rig the Treads so that you can move this empty object in the center and that is going to rotate the Treads and the wheels and you'll also be able to rotate the Treads around and the wheels will move correctly and you can also rotate the treads on the z-axis and rotate them back and forth and you can see the wheels and Treads will moved correctly now the following video is a short clip from my black under course my sci-fi construction robot and that is an 11p part tutorial series and it's all step by step in real time and I'll show you how to create this sci-fi construction robot and we even rig and animate the robot so if you'd like to learn more about the course then you can check out the product trailer video with the link in the description and you can also check out the product pages with the links in the description and when you purchase the course as well as getting all of the 11 video tutorials you'll also get the finished project files like the robot 3D model and the finished animation and the sound effects and everything that we use in the tutorial so I hope you enjoy this free clip from the course so I'm just going to start by selecting everything and I'll just delete everything so I'll now go to the ad menu let's go here to mesh and we're going to add a new Cube so I'm now going to scale the cube down by 0.1 so I'll type in 0.1 and enter Because I just want to make it a bit smaller cuz the default objects in blender are pretty large so I now want to press crl a and I just want to apply that scale so this is now the object's new default size and let's hit the Tab Key to go into edit mode so in edit mode I'm going to scale this object and I'll scale it on the z-axis and I'll scale it by 0 2 so that is even thinner and then I'm also going to scale it on the Y AIS by 05 so it's a little bit smaller that way and then I want to scale it on the x axis by a 2.8 so it is a bit longer and that is going to be the first tread and then we'll be adding an array modifier to add more Treads so let's now hit the Tab Key to go back into object mode I'll go to the ad menu and we're going to go here to curve and we're going to create a curve and then we're going to make the Treads follow that curve so I'm just going to add the bezier curve and after I add it I'm going to rotate it on the z-axis by 90° just hit enter to rotate that around and then I'll go into edit mode and I'm going to select this curve handle right here and I want to rotate it flat so I'll select that handle and I'll rotate it on the z-axis I'll type in 45 and then I need to hit negative and then hit enter so now you can see that it is straightened so I'll now hit the three on the numpad to go to side view and I'm just going to select this handle here I want to extrude out the curve and then I want to shape it so I'll hit e to extrude bring this out here and then I can rotate this over and kind of scale this down a bit and you can see there are little grids in blender and I want to make it about three grids long so I'm going to actually bring this back a little bit it's going to be about three grids so two grids in the center and then half of this grid and half of this grid so about that big eat to extrude bring that there and then rotate that over just like that and then I will select this handle here and extrude it again we can click with our middle Mouse wheel and bring that over there so you can see there is one grid then here's the other grid and then we're just going to have it be half of this grid so I'll extrude it to about there rotate that over by 90° and then if I select both of these handles I can press the F key to fill that and I can also scale these handles down because they're a bit too big so now that I've modeled the main shape of this I do want to scale it down a bit so it's a bit smaller so I'll select everything in edit mode I'll hit s to scale and I'll just type in like 7 and hit enter and then I can just bring it down there on the z-axis and just stick it like that all right so I'll hit the Tab Key to go back to object mode and I now want to add some modifiers to this tread piece so let's click over here to the modifiers panel and I'll click on ADD modifier we can go to the search here and I'm just going to search for array we'll choose the array modifier and then on the array settings I'm going to turn the factor X to Zero I want to have it be arraying on the Y so here on the Y I can turn it to one and then I do want a tiny little Gap here so for now I'll turn the Y to like a 1.01 or actually maybe like a 1.1 so there's just a tiny little Gap Gap there uh between the arrayed objects and then I can turn up the count and I'll just turn it up to like maybe a 50 for now so there's 50 of them so now I want to add the curve modifier so that this object wraps around the curve so I'll click on ADD modifier let's add the curve modifier and then if I click on the eye dropper here I can just click on the beer curve so now you can see it's wrapping around the curve so now I also want to add a bevel to Bevel out the object here and bevel out that Cube so I'll go to the ad menu and let's just search for a bevel and we'll choose the bever modifier I can scroll down here and then I'm going to turn these segments up to like a three and then I will hold down the shift key and I'm going to click and drag on this amount here and I'm going to make it very very small and specifically I'm going to go with a 0.0008 I think that is a good size there and then I'm going to use the object context menu and shade the object smooth now I want to make sure that the Treads aren't overlapping so if I go up here to the array I can turn this down you can see that right over here it is overlapping if I turn the array count down it's overlapping so what I want to actually do is change this relative offset because I think there's a little bit too big of a gap and I want them to be touching each other maybe I'll even go with a 1.02 and then you can see it is overlapping a bit so this count here let's turn it down to 49 and now you can see there's just a little bit of a space there so this Factor y let's just turn that up a tiny bit more all right so that's pretty good so for me a 1.026 works well and then the count at 49 and now it is seamless and the spacing in between each one of those Treads are even now if you go into wireframe view and then select the curve here I can go back to solid View and if I move this by hitting G to grab and then move it on the Y AIS you can see now the Treads are actually going to rotate when the curve is moving all right so I'm now going to be creating the wheel object so I'll go to the add menu let's go to mesh and we can add a circle for the wheel and I can rotate the circle on the y axis by 90° and then I just want to move it over here so it's on the side of the tread so I'll now go into edit mode and I want to scale this way down and then hit the three on the numpad to go to side view and let's go back to object mode and I'm going to bring this object up and I'll bring it up on the z-axis and kind of place it there in the center just like that and then I can go back into edit mode and I'm going to scale the entire vertices down in edit mode just like that and then go back to object mode and bring it down a little bit so it's right there in the center and it's just the right size and then we'll go into edit mode again and I'll press the F key just to fill a face there and then I will extrude it out by hitting the E ke key so e to extrude and we're going to bring it all the way over there right to the end then I can hit the I key that is going to inser the face and I'll make it much smaller and I'll hit the e key again to extrude all right let's go back to object mode and I want to add a bevel to this object so I'll click on ADD modifier we can search for the bevel modifier just add that bevel and the segments I'm going to turn this up to three and then also let's turn the amount down so again I will hold down the shift key and then I'll drag this amount and I'll make that much smaller and then I'll use the object context menu and just shade that smooth all right let's go back into edit mode and I want to add some more details here on the front so I'll hit the I key just to inser that face there and I'll bring that in then I can hit the e key and we'll extrude that back there then I can hit the I key again we'll make that much smaller kind of like that and I can hit the e key and just extrude that out and then what I also want to do is add some circles here so what I'll do is hold down the shift and ALT key and select that Loop there so we can kind of Select that Circle I'll PR press shift d to duplicate it and we're going to bring it over on the x- axis and we'll scale it way down let's hit three on the numpad to go to side view and I can bring it up on the Z AIS and I can scale the whole thing up a little bit kind of like that and I can bring it back on the x-axis and just stick it right in there so it comes out a little bit all right press one on the numpad actually three on the numpad to go to front view I can press shift d to duplicate and let's bring it down on the z-axis like that and then I want to have more of them all the way around so what I can do is just hover my mouse over this circle and press the L key to select the linked vertices and then I can press shift d to duplicate and then right after I duplicate it I can hit R to rotate and I'll type in 9d and then enter and then I'll press the L key with my mouse hovered over this and the L key with my mouse hovered over that Circle I'll press shift d to duplicate and then R to rotate this time I'll just type 45 and then enter so now you can see we have all those little circles there that adds some cool details so I can hit tab to go back to object mode now in the previous part we did rotate this object and I want to apply the rotation so that this is the object's new default rotation so I'll just press crl a and we're just going to apply the rotation and actually we might as well also press CR a and just apply the scale to make sure that the scale and rotation is applied but these objects here we want to keep them how they are we don't want to apply those because if I press crl a and apply the rotation scale you can see they get messed up so I'll press contrl Z to undo that so if we go to wireframe I can select the curve and if I rotate the curve on the z-axis you can see see that the Treads are being deformed so I'm going to show you how to fix that now so I'll go back to solid view so what we want to do is make the Treads follow the rotation of the curve so we're going to select the Treads and then we're going to click over here to go to the constraint properties let's click on ADD object constraint and I'm going to add the child of and then the target here you can click here and you can choose the bezier curve or you can also click on it here but right now it's easier just to click on it here in the drop down now if I hold down the Z button and go to wireframe and then just select the Curve here if I move the curve on the Y AIS you can see that the child of constraint has kind of messed up the rigging and so the Treads now aren't rotating so if I click on the Treads we want to disable the location y so click on that so it'll be a child of the curve and it'll move with the location rotation and scale these are all checked but we just want to turn off the Y so now if I select the curve there and move it over on the Y AIS you can see now the Treads are rotating correctly now I want to add another object which is going to control the treads cuz it's pretty annoying to have to go into wireframe and kind of Select that object there it's kind of hard to select and you can't really see it so I will press shift C and shift c will make sure that the 3D cursor is in the center there I can now go to the add menu and we're just going to add an empty object so I'm going to choose an empty plane axis now I'm going to hit G to grab and I'm going to move this over on the x- axis and just stick it here and this empty here is going to be in between the two Treads so now what I can do is go into wireframe and I can just select the curve and then I can hold down the shift key and select the empty last I'll now press contrl p and I can set parent to object keep transform so if I go back to solid view now I can just select the empty and I can move it and you can see the Treads will move with it so that is great now you can see if I double tap the r key to enable the track Bell rotation you can see there's still some issues with the rigging you can see that the curve is being all messed up and warped so what I'm going to do is select the Treads here and we need to add some more constraint to the Treads so to fix this I'm going to click on ADD object constraint and we are adding this to the Treads object object so add object constraint and we're going to add the pivot we're going to add the pivot constraint right there now if we choose the target we want to choose the be curve cuz we want it to Pivot with that curve now this rotation range we want to click on this and we're going to make it netive Z so now if I select this object here and double tap the r key you can see it is a bit more fixed so that is working well but you can see when I rotate it in certain directions it's still messed up so we need to fix this one more time so I'll click on the Treads object again and let's click going to add object constraint and we're going to add another pivot and then this one for the Target again we're just going to choose the beer curve now for this one on the rotation range instead of it being negative Z we want to change this one to the positive Z so this first pivot will fix the rotation on the negative Z but then the second one here will fix the rotation on the positive so that way it can rotate backwards and forwards and it'll fix the negative Z and the positive Z and if I double tap the r key and kind of rotate this around you can see it is fully fixed but I can still move this back and forth and the tread is rotating correctly so now I want to create some more treads on the other side so I will hold down the Z button and go to wireframe so I'm going to select the tread then I'll hold down the shift key and select the curve so now press shift d to duplicate and then if I bring it over on the x-axis you can see it's kind of being messed up because there's kind of like an offset so I'll just hit the Escape key to bring it back where it is now I can just select one of those curves there and I can hit G to grab and move it over on the z-axis and you can see that tread is being moved along with that curve and that is because this child of so the child of is going to make it follow along with the Curve so I can just bring it over here so I'll press seven on the nump pad to go to top view and I'm going to bring this to about the center so I'll hit G to grab bring it over on the x- axis and make that about the center so the empty is in the center so now if I move the empty you can see the empty is moving the objects and this circle object here we'll fix that later but for now you can see it's moving both of those objects so moving the Treads so if I select the empty I want to bring the empty back to the center because I want the robot to actually be in the center when it's at its default position so with the empty selected you can press alt G alt G is going to clear the transforms so if I go back to solid view you can see it's now in the center so I'll now press the one on the numpad to go to front view and I'll hold down the Z button and go to the wireframe so now I want to bring the treads in a bit so that it's not quite as wide so I'm going to just select this curve here I'll hit G to grab and bring it over on the x-axis and I want to bring it in here and just stick it about there so I'll select this curve here G to grab bring it over on the x-axis and just stick it right about there so then I can select the wheel let's hit one on the numpad I'll hit G to grab bring it over on the x- axis and just stick the wheel where it's supposed to be so kind of right here in the center of that tread let's hold down the Z button and go back to solid view so let's press contrl s again to save the file now if I select the empty and move the empty back and forth you can see the wheel isn't moving along with it so let's now rig the wheel so the first thing we can do is we can select the wheel and then hold down the shift key and select the empty I can now press control p and I'm going to set parent to object keep transform so if I select the empty and move it back and forth you can see it's moving along with it now the problem is that this wheel isn't rotating it is moving but it's not actually rotating as it's moving so we're going to select the wheel and we're going to go back here to the constraints then we're going to click on ADD object constraint and we're going to add this transformation so this transformation we can choose a Target which is going to be another object and then there is a map from setting and a map to setting so we're going to use the transformation to basically tell it so that when this object moves back and forth this object is going to rotate so let's click on the target here let's click on the eye dropper and then we can choose the empty object now here on the owner we want to change this to the local space and that is because the world space is the z-axis up and down the Y AIS back and forth and the XA access back and forth this way but I'm changing the owner to the local space because let's say I rotate the robot like this now I want the wheel to rotate over like this so it's going to rotate at an angle so it's going to rotate on its local space instead of the global space so if I hit R to rotate and then hit X to rotate on the x- axis this is the global X if I however hit R to rotate and then hit the X key once and then hit the X key twice it's now rotating on its local SP space and so I want it to rotate like that cuz if I were to rotate on the global space you can see it would get deformed and messed up so I'm just going to select the empty here and press alt R to clear the rotation now the map from is going to be what this object is going to do so basically when the empty is transformed the other object is going to move by this transform so we want to map from location because we want it to affect the location of the empty so we'll choose location and then here on the Y Min we want to type in -1 and then here on the Y Max we just want to type in one so now we can go to the map two and for the map two I want it to affect the rotation of the wheel so from the map 2 instead of it being set to location we're going to change it to rotation instead now right here on the source axis on the X Source axis we want to actually change this to Y and then we want to have this object be able to rotate all the way around by 360° so here on the minimum I want to turn this all the way up and I can actually drag it all the way up and you can see 180 is the max and and then the maximum I can drag this all the way back and I want to turn it to- 180 so these are the two maximum values so just to recap we're basically saying that when the empty is moving on the y- AIS that's going to make the wheel rotate on the x-axis so if I select the empty I can hit G to grab and I can bring it over on the Y AIS and you can see now that is rotating correctly now there is a problem if I hit G to grab and bring it over on the Y AIS you can see once it's rotated by 180° it's going to stop and so to fix this I'll hit the Escape key what we need to do is select the wheel and we can click on this extrapolate button so this way it's kind of going to Loop it so if I now select the empty and hit G to grab and then bring this over on the y- AIS you can see it's just going to continue to rotate no matter how far I bring it so I'll hit the Escape key to bring that back now if for some reason I wanted to change the rotation speed if I select the wheel I could change the minimum and the maximum values so if I turn the minimum like way down now if I select the empty and move it you can see the wheel is moving but it kind of looks like it's skidding or sliding because it's not moving at the right speed so if I click on the wheel I want to turn this back to 180 so now if I select the empty you can see that's moving at the correct speed you can see if you compare it to the Treads there it looks like it's moving correctly now there is another problem and that is if I rotate the empty on the z-axis you can see again it looks like it's skidding or sliding because I want it to actually rotate back and forth with the Treads so to fix this we are going to use a driver so I'm going to press the N key to open up the side panel here and I'm going to click up here on item and then we're just going to select the wheel now we want to add the driver to the rotation X here on the wheel so I'm going to write click and then we're going to click on ADD driver so this is going to bring up a little panel and if you drag your mouse out of the driver setting you can see it goes away but there is a purple area here and that is telling it that we have a driver on that property so if you need to bring it back just just right click and then click on edit driver and then if you just drag away it'll go away so right click and then click on edit driver so now in the object here we want to click on this here click on the eye dropper and we want to choose the empty object so then again let's right click and click on edit driver so you can now see on the object it is set to empty now here on the type right now it's set to X location but we want the wheel to be rotated on the z-axis so on the type here we'll click on X location and sorry my screencast keys are in the way but we're going to change it to the Z rotation so just find the Z rotation so basically what the driver is doing if I click here on edit driver it's basically saying that when this empty rotates on the z-axis that is going to affect the rotation of this wheel and we chose the X rotation and that is going to be rotating around like that so now if I select the empty if I rotate the empty on the z-axis you can see now it is moving back and forth now there is a problem if I rotate the empty on the z-axis you can see that it's sliding in the opposite direction and so we want to flip that so let's select the wheel again we're going to right click and then we'll click on edit driver and then we're going to go right down here and we're going to click on show in driver's editor and so this is going to open up a new window and blender and what I'm going to do is just drag this window over here and stick it here and then I'll do the same thing over here so I have blender over here and then I have the driver editor over here and so we can control how the driver is being affected so if I hold down the control key and then middle click and drag I can drag this way down and make it smaller and you can see there's going to be this line here now if I press the N key to close the side panel I can zoom in here now if I go back over to the driver editor I can hit R to rotate and I can rotate that rotation value and so you can see by rotating it it's going to switch the rotation that it's going to actually rotate using that driver so I'm just going to rotate it over here and just kind of stick it about there so now if I select the empty and rotate the empty again you can see now it's rotating in the correct direction because first it was rotated over this way but we basically want to mirror it so it is opposite so we're going to rotate it over here now if I rotate the empty on the Z axis it kind of looks like it's sliding a little bit so I'll just hit the Escape key to go back and I'm going to select the wheel so I can now just rotate this and I'm going to rotate that driver property and then this way if I select the empty and rotate it again you can see it's moving a bit faster and if I were to rotate this like way over rotate it way over now if I select the empty and rotate it it's rotating very fast so that doesn't look right so so basically you're just going to have to rotate this angle to an angle that you think looks good and for me this angle is going to work pretty well so if I now select the empty and rotate it on the z-axis you can see that looks just about correct all right so now what I'm going to do is just click on the x button here to close this driver setting and I'll just make blender full screen again all right so now what I want to do is duplicate all the wheels let's just press crl s to save so I'm going to select the wheel here and I'll press three on the numpad to go to side view and I'll press shift d to duplicate and I can bring the wheel over on the Y AIS and just stick it about there and then shift d to duplicate and bring it over on the y- axis and bring it back to about there and then because we duplicated these after we added those drivers and those other settings if I select the empty and rotate it rotate it on the z-axis you can see it's going to have the same effect so now I want to duplicate them and move them over to the other side so I'm going to select the three wheels in object mode I'm going to press shift d to duplicate and I'll bring it over on the x- axis then I can hit the Tab Key to go into edit mode and I'll select everything and I'll hit s to scale and I'm going to scale all of the mesh on the xaxis and then I'll type in -1 and then enter so we're basically inverting it or flipping the mesh and then because we did that we need to recalculate the normals so just press shift n to recalculate the normals so I can now bring it over a little bit and I'll hit tab to go back to object mode and I can hit G to grab and I can bring the entire thing over on the x-axis and just stick it right there in about the center so now if I select the empty I can rotate it and you can see is following along however there's a problem and that is that it looks like it's sliding again because it is rotating in the opposite direction so to fix this we need to change the rotation Oiler that we added on the driver and we need to make it rotate in the opposite direction so let's select this object here I'll press the N key to open up the side panel and I can right click here on the rotation X and click on edit driver then I can go right down here and I can click on show in driver editor this will again bring up the driver editor and I'll just hold down the control key and click and drag with my middle Mouse wheel and make that much smaller and I basically just want to invert this back to how it was so I'll hit s to scale then I'll hit X to scale on the x- axis I can type in -1 and then enter there we go now it's rotated over so if I drag this over to my other monitor I can now just select the empty here and I can rotate the empty like that and you can see now that Center wheel is looking correct so let's select this object here and I'll bring the driver editor back here to my other monitor and I can scale this on the x axis type in -1 and then enter all right so I'll drag the driver editor over here let's just select the last one and then I can drag the driver editor back and again scale this on the x axis type in -1 to invert it and hit enter and then I can just close the driver editor so now if I just select the empty here and rotate it you can see that is rotating correctly all right now one more thing before we finish up this part later in the tutorial series when we do all of the rigging when the robot has his pose and when I pose the robot I want to clear all the transforms and have the robot go back to his default pose and that's really helpful for when you're doing different animations with the robot so if I press the a key to select all the objects I can press alt R to clear the rotations alt G to clear the movements and then alt s to clear the scale but that is a problem because you can see it's resetting everything and messing everything up so let me just press contrl Z to undo that so to fix this I want to lock all the transforms so I'm to select this wheel here let's press the N key to open up the side panel and on all of the objects except the empty I want to lock all these transforms because the drivers and the constraints are going to move the object and the empty will move the object but all the other objects we can lock the transforms so let's select the wheel and then here on the transforms you can click and drag on these little locks here and that's going to lock all of them so if I hit G to grab or R to rotate or S to scale you can see it's locked so we're going to select the wheel click and drag to lock all these select this wheel click and drag to lock them select the tread here click and drag to lock them and then if I go into wireframe I also want to select that curve there and then we're going to click and drag to lock that and then if I select the other curve I want to click and drag to lock that I can click here on the Treads click and drag to lock all those let's go back to solid View and then I can click on the wheel and lock all that click on the wheel lock all of that and click on this final wheel and lock all that so if I press the N key now to close the the side panel I can select this empty here and you can see the empty is still going to move the objects because it's using the drivers and the constraints so that is still working correctly however if I press the a key to select all the objects I can press alt R alt G and ALT s and you can see the object stay where they are so that is how you create these rigged treads in blender so I hope you found the video helpful and thank you for watching and if you'd like to check out the full course on how to create the Sci-Fi construction robot then definitely check out the course trailer video and the course product pages with the links in the description and that's an 11p part tutorial Series where I show you step by step in real time how to create this sci-fi construction robot and in the tutorial series we rig the entire robot and animate the robot and create this finished robot animation so definitely check out the robot course with the links in the description but I hope you found this helpful and thank you for [Music] watching [Music]

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 8,534

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, rig treads, blender rigging, drivers, rig tank treads, blender treads rigging, animate tank treads, robot tutorial, construction robot blender, blender tutorial, blender robot, blender tank treads

Id: B2A363iHacQ

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2024