Joints working

My current goal is to get that snow mobile working. On this way, there are several obstacles and I managed to get around one of them. My plan is to implement the tracks as conveyor belts as illustrated in the Newton Game Dynamics forum - where it didn’t work as expected, but I don’t understand any of the alternatives. To get this working, I needed to get joints working. And I got them working.

The general idea relies on the tracks having a different material for Newton than the main body. Since Newton allows only one material per rigid body, I had to move the tracks in different bodys and connect them to the main body. On first try, this caused the snow mobile to float in space and not move at all. To see whether this was caused by joints, I removed them. Then I found out that the problem was that I forgot to set mass and moment of inertia for the tracks, which caused them to be completely static. Once I fixed this, but before I reenabled the joints, I took this nice picture:

Snow mobile with tracks lying around

When I reenabled the joints, I got the positions wrong:

Snow mobile with tracks as wings, looking very stupid

I eventually got this working:

Snow mobile looking just like it did a few days ago, but with tracks attached as seperate bodys

So just now I decided to change the joint to a flexible hinge joint, which allows the track to rotate around an axis. This is more or less all suspension this vehicle will ever get, so it’s gonna be a rough ride, but it’s working.

A snow mobile, with tracks bent

Next thing will be using materials, and then getting material callbacks working.

Written on September 8th, 2005 at 03:17 pm

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