If you need to rig a tank track, conveyor belts or other similar stuff you can use this project. Fully procedural with geometry nodes.

This workflow lets you define a custom curve and automatically creates the wheels and the track based by the radius of the control points you can manage as you need. You can choose to use custom pieces for the wheels or the track and you can enable collision with a custom floor.

Features

With this workflow you can manage these parameters in the Geometry nodes:Wheels width: It define the width of the wheels if the flag Use custom wheel is disabled.

• Use custom wheel: It lets you to switch between the built in wheels (simple cylinders) and custom wheel
• Custom wheel: The object that would be instantiated on the control points if the flag Use Custom wheel is enabled.
• Track piece: The custom object instantiated to fill all the curve around the wheels
• Piece distance: this let you have the perfect constant offset between the track pieces on the curve when you are using complex shape
• Animation: This controls the animation of the track and of the custom wheels. Using native drivers feature of Blender you can easily automate the values of this attribute
• Floor (check): If enabled, the wheels and the track pieces themselves will always stay on the top of a specified surface you can set in the next parameter
• Floor: The object on which the tank track needs to stay on top if the Floor check is enabled

Uses

To use this procedural modifier in your project you can just use the downloaded file as is or open your project, use the Append menu of Blender, selecting this file, then NodeTree and then Tank track. After the append you will be able to add the geometry node setup on any curves.

In the content you will find the blend file with the setup of the animation of the video tutorial.

Tutorial

If you want to learn how i made it check the video below, have fun and if you like what i'm doing please subscribe on my YT channel checking the bell icon to be notified on the new posted videos! :-)

License