Looking for any hints or tips in creating animated treads for a game. We would just go with moving the UV’s on a surface but we have some things in the project which require them to be actual models because we need the detail.
A thought that maybe moving normal maps along a surface would do but I’m not sure if your able to actually move normal maps, atleast not without a performance hit.
Any help is aprecitated.
You can move normal maps. You have three choices with normal maps, it might help to look at the pictures I posted here.
If your treads are a single fused mesh, and you’re using morphing or bones to deform the verts of the tread, then you’ll need to use Tangent-space maps. But if each tread is its own mesh, and all you’re doing is rotating and moving them at the object level, then you can use Object-space maps (if your game supports it).
As far as the physical process of rotating those treads around, that depends on your 3d software. This has been discussed often in the 3ds max section, a search there will dig it up (if this is what you’re using).
I recall with UT2004 they just offset the UVs, and made sure the speed matched the forward velocity of the model. Worked pretty well. You could even combine the normal map with a color map and a transparency map to affect the silhouette a little.
Good luck. I’d love to see what it ends up like.
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