Any way to keep an object on the end of a joint (i.e the 'child') as moveable but stop it flapping around as it's parent moves?
In this case it's a gun turret attached to a helicopter, via a ball joint. I have a 'Look At Rotator' finding targets and making the gun point at them, and it's fine as long as the chopper is absolutely still. When the chopper moves at all, the gun does not want to play ball.
I need something that will hold the gun in place at all times, in relation to the helicopter, while still having the authority to move the gun around on the ball joint.
At the moment, if for example I'm hovering above the ground, let's say facing north, then I turn to the right to face east, the gun turret will still be facing north as I turn and then decide to try and catch up a couple of seconds later. It looks horrible. I've tried making the ball joint stiff and just giving the rotator crazy amounts of power but nothing changes.
Is there some particular way of grouping things or tweaking options that will make the gun stick with the orientation of the vehicle, while still responding to rotations that (should) only affect the gun?
At this point I've spent so long playing with which parts are moveable and not moveable, what's grouped with what, ignoring gravity etc... that I'm thinking I may have to abandon the method and go with keyframe animation somehow.
Any ideas from clever people, or any people for that matter, would be appreciated!
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I suspect your heli movement is applying rotational forces to your turret as well which is not what you want. You want the turret to move position with the heli but have the rotation applied only within it;s own scope.
Attach your turret with a bolt to a block sculpt. Group these together and nest them inside your Helicopter group. You want to be one level deeper than whatever the movers are wired to. Set the block to invisible in its tweak menu.
Disable gravity on the block and turret and set the group properties to not moveable. This will keep their positions within the helicopter group static. The objects will still be moveable *within* their group
Now hopefully your turret will fly around with the heli but the forces doing the moving on the heli will affect the group as a whole and not your rotation joint on the turret.
Scope into your turret group and have the 'rotate' actions for the turret inside here. I found making the parent connector object big ( literally scaled up ) and heavy ( density in the tweak menu ) will make for a stronger connection that does not get overridden by other forces. -
Ha, you've just described exactly the setup that I'm working with! Only difference is I have a ball joint, not a bolt, as I want to give the turret x and y authority to rotate (where z is local forward).
At least I think it's the same. I'm going to go check if it matches your description exactly.
And the density things works even when the object in question is ignoring gravity? That's counter-intuitive...but damn useful! -
I haven't used ball joints much, mostly bolts, are you seeing the red stretchy line of death on your purple connector? If so then increasing the density of the object has fixed rotation along an axis for me.
I made something with rotation along Y and X with 2 separate bolts ( think aimable golf club ) and the only way I could get it stable was nesting the groups and make the parent connector objects for both connectors really big and dense. This seems to have a restraining effect and kept them stable. -
No :(
Sadly it is indeed setup as you describe but it doesn't make any difference. As you said, "The objects will still be moveable *within* their group", which I guess means that's why the turret still flaps about like nobody's business. It ignores the chopper movement completely until it hits the angle limits of the ball joint. -
Just saw your last.
Not getting the red stretchy. So that's something I guess. The joint seems solid but inexplicably loose, despite what I do with any of the tweak options.
Might give it a go with two bolts in a nested chain as you describe and see if it's any different. -
Just so you know, you don't need to turn on "movable" for it to be able to move. "Movable" actually means "moves physically." So if you don't want it to flap about physically, you can turn that off.
The look-at rotator will still do its thing, depending on its strength setting. -
Yeah, cheers, but if I turn it off, it does not rotate at all and Dreams thinks it's then just part of the chassis. So any rotators acting to rotate the gun actually start rotating the entire chopper. Believe me, I have spent maaaaany hours going through all the various combinations of groupings and moveability trying to get around it!
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I had a load of challenges with my pirate ship and it's moving parts (cannon and wheel). In the end I used a bolt and an advanced rotator but I only have one axis of rotation. As described already I would create a two tier mechanism - a block and bolt for one axis, connected with a bolt which rotates along the other axis. Add look at rotators to each section which only deal with the single axis. The other key question is how is your Heli moving? My ship has animation and movers, which unleashes all hell if things aren't grouped and nested properly - if you are using both animation and movers let me know and I can describe how I have nested everything!
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The heli as a whole is moving via movers and rotators, while I have abandoned those for the independent movement of the gun turret (due to the issues described). So now the gun movement is based on an 'X Axis Timeline' and a 'Y Axis Timeline', which is a pain as it means I can no longer use stuff like the Look-At Rotator. Instead I have the Look-At Rotator present so it feeds me target position and orientation, but it has zero strength so it can't actually move anything. I've actually got it working so it does lock onto targets now but it was a major pain having to collect all the position and rotation data and then manually work out how far along each timeline I need the gun to move etc....numerous chips worth of lengthy logic and it took me about 3 days to do!
Be interested to know how your ship is setup regarding the movers vs animations and grouping etc...
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