I’m looking to build a playable tank vehicle using the chaos vehicles system. I’ve built a few wheeled tank vehicles now and have the hang of how that process works, but its time to build one with treads.
it looks like in the video, there are separate tread bones for each wheel in the tread, and the animation blueprint is taking the wheel suspension movement and giving the same movement to sections of the tread. Am I understanding that right?
My question is, If I’m making my own model instead, how do I rig the treads in blender so that I can perform the above animation? Like I stated above, I’ve made a few wheeled vehicle models that were properly rigged for the wheeled vehicle animation blueprint, so I get how that process works. I just need some insight into what differences there might be and how the rigging process might look adding in treads as well.
Doesn’t seem like there’s very much on this topic on YouTube given how new the chaos vehicle system is and adding on top of that a treaded vehicle, so any help or insight anyone could provide me would be greatly appreciated!
Hey there @Violentlaw! So this specific tutorial does actually go into the rigging a bit, just in it’s first part that I’ll link below. The bones are actually already prepared with the vigilante assets and it seems like they are all their own specific leaf bones, so when you’re rigging, each wheel needs it’s own bone, as well as an axle point to be able to manipulate it.
Did you own the vigilante assets to be able to view the bones?
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Thanks, I am aware that it goes over how to do it for the vigilante asset. That’s however not entirely what I’m looking for.
What I want is to learn how I would rig my own tank model, from blender into unreal 5. My own model, meaning a treaded tank model I’ve created myself. I already know how to do most of it as I’ve setup chaos vehicles before. I’m just trying to learn the process for how to integrate animated treads into the suspension model for any and all future tank models I will create myself.
I understood that! I was suggesting that you could reference the bone structure, other than that there’s not much extra external that needs to be done rigging besides the skinning portion. Everything else that the presenter does with the vigilante tank you’d do to most tanks that you’d create by hand. If you’re looking for a tutorial on how to rig in blender I could find that for you as well.
With the information from the bone structure, the binding, and that you’ve already set up custom chaos vehicles before, you’re basically all set to hit the ground running with the tank model itself!
So I did go ahead and imported a vigilante asset as an fbx into blender, but I didn’t really get much out of it in terms of how to adapt that to building my own tank. I noticed that for the vigilante asset, it seemed that there was an armature with many bones setup on the model, but that’s not how I’ve done my chaos vehicles before, so because of that, I dont really ‘get it’ so to say.
Here’s where I’m confused. When I’ve made wheeled chaos vehicles before, In Blender, I just parent each individual wheel to the main body of the vehicle and I’m good to export and setup the mesh as a chaos vehicle.
What I’m looking to figure out, is where adding treads fits into that set of steps. and how the tread model is setup in blender. I would think I could just face cut a hole in a cube and then shape it into a tread shape and pop some wheels inside the radius of the tread, do the parenting and call it good.
But then how do I setup the tread model so I can animate it with the suspension model for the wheels in unreal? How do I separate out sections of the tread in blender so its setup in a way that is easily animatable in unreal?
Hey man In blender Im currently trying to setup an animated tank track that rotates around all the wheels of the tank!
I think what ill do is have different sections of track links wrapping around the wheels with bones assigned to each section of them. Then each section will move one track link length and it will appear to be a continuous loop of rotation.
I think what Im going to do is model a low poly single track link and then duplicate 10 of them in a line and assign a bone to those for the bottom part of the track. Then when I when I add animation ill be able to move them over one track link distance so it appears they are rotating in a loop. That way ill be able to use minimal amount of bones hopefully. So then ill do the same for the top section of tank track, assign one bone to the ten track links on the top area and move them one link distance in the animation and then for the corners I may need one bone per track link in order to have a smooth rotation around the edges of the wheels.
I plan to have the wheels and the tracks as separate components on my tank blueprint so making the tracks as separate components may allow you to slap them on the chaos wheels you already have and turn of the tracks collisions.
Goodluck to us both!
Actual mesh pieces moving around are just going to cause all sorts of hell (Dubbed Chaos by epic).
The system needs to be runtime reacrive not animatable by a DCC.
Instead of loosing your minds doing this as a rigged mesh, loose your minds making a shader material for it.
You can move actual verticis just the same, but you do it 10 times faster and likely with a lot less complications thanks to things like DistanceToNearestSurface.
Just like vehicle wheels should never be made to simulate physics in order to spin, a tank’s track should probably never be made to simulate physics when moving.
Now this doesn’t necessarily mean you should make the track into a uniform single mesh - though would that be such a bad idea in practice?
What I mean by this is panning a material over it for movement, and ofc shifting/offsetting it to keep up with contact points or the shape of the terrain at each individual vertex.
