tracks & underside & more

[poesel]

I'm now trying to give the Apollon a test drive so I tried to fit the rest of the chassis.

The trough (is that the word for it?) isn't anything special, isn't it? Just a covering for the underbelly?

How do tracks work? How do they get animated?

A _very_ useful thing would be to have a complete vehicle with all things in place. I'm using Sketchup as many here seem to do and it can't directly import .cob. So I go over Blender which seems to mess with the scaling. Additionally Apollo consists of four different parts and I don't know how their relative position is.

A complete vehicle would give a very helpful example.

So where should be the origin of the parts?

And does someone know how to name faces in Sketchup to assign the armour values?

Thanks

[poesel]

Ok, the armour values thing has been answered already in the tank destroyer thread. I've put it in the Wiki:

http://dropteam.johalla.de/moin.cgi/Designing_3D_Elements?action=show

Adzling, how did you get the complete model into sketchup? The tracks get really out of scale if I do that with blender.

[poesel]

Talking to myself here...

Ok, small interludium from the Apollon. I'm trying to make a simple cube and get it into the game (its aptly named 'Bjorg').

I've got the complete model with six textures (1 to 6 as text) as .obj and I've got 6 .obj for each side without textures.

Then I change Bjorg.physicalobjectgroup like:

<ModelFile>Bjorg.obj</ModelFile>

Now the collision model:

<CollisionModel>BjorgFrontCollision.obj</CollisionModel>

<CollisionModel>BjorgLeftCollision.obj</CollisionModel>

...

Correct?

What do I do with <CollisionBox> and <CollisionTriangle>? Can I just delete them?

[adzling]

you've gotten further than me at this point.

good to see someone monkeying with the scripting

yurch and clay seem to have all the answers re: scripting.

as far as scaling goes i scale the treads within sketchup to match the chassis size (of course i had to scale that first).

I got some overall dimensions from clay for the afv's in dropteam and have used those figures to scale all the vehicles in sketchup, i'll post those values later on when i dig em out.

btw i have a pretty decent library of components built in sketchup (guns and things from the game).

I[ll post those later this week for you to play with

[adzling]

oh and the tracks are animate by moving the track texture around the track, the track itself doesn't move, neither do any of the wheels

if you read that tank destroyer thread you'll understand how the components are placed but the general overview goes like this:

one component for the turret

one for the chassis (including tracks etc)

one for the gun assembly (i.e. maingun with mantel and any coax).

the turret gets placed with it's center of rotation on the origin of the x/y/z axis

the chassis gets placed with the center of it's mass on the x/y axis and it's lowest point (usually the tracks or wheels) on the ground plane (i.e. origin of the z axis).

the main gun gets placed with it's center of elevation/depression on the origin of the x/y axis and it's lowest point (usually the mantle but maybe there is no mantle) on the ground plane (origin of the z axis)

hope this helps

[ClaytoniousRex]

Sorry for the slow replies lately, gents.

What do I do with <CollisionBox> and <CollisionTriangle>? Can I just delete them?

You can delete the CollisionTriangles because you're using CollisionModels instead. You only use one or the other; they're two different ways of specifying the set of collision triangles for the model.

You do need CollisionBoxes, though. This is a set of boxes that roughly describe the volume and shape of your object. The boxes are used for coarse collision detection, while the triangles are used for fine-grained collision detection. They both need to be correct for your new vehicle to work properly.

You can use as many boxes as you need, and you can use the <Angle> tag to have rotated boxes if you need them (see the crashed starship wreck for an extreme example). The idea is use as few as possible (to keep performance up), but use enough to accurately specify your vehicle's shape so collision will appear correct to the user.

Also remember that you have a set of boxes for each PhysicalObject. So, for example, the chassis should not have a CollisionBox that covers the turret; that one should be in the Turret's PhysicalObject tag.

[adzling]

i put some of this stuff up on the wiki

[poesel]

Just to make sure: with this new 6 models for armour method we don't need to designate a named picture (front.bmp,...) anymore, yes?

I'd like to clarify that for the Wiki.

[adzling]

the named picture is just to help you with the deletion of faces....or at least that's how i read clay's description of the process

[ClaytoniousRex]

That's right Poesel, no need to muck with any images when using CollisionModels. The images were only needed to specify which triangles are front, left, etc. Your CollisionModels already do that explicitly.