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Recently I made some very nice looking mech models, and most of them work, except - the legs. No matter how hard I try or how many tutorial levels I go to I cant get my mechs to walk properly! :( (This is using wobble bolts)
PLEASE help!
Also, while I'm in the help section would you guys mind showing me how to make links into words (like Bob instead of a really long http thing with this and that and everything :) )
So for your mech problem, just make it look like it's walking and use a mover at a reasonable speed. :/ I have the same thing as you and a mech genius couldn't even fix mine... -_- And for the linking thing, use Hyperlink. Try clicking here. I think that works... Highlight the word you want, then do the insert link thing.
Play the level Gaia - by Fluxlasers, and if you like what you see, send him a LBInvite and tell him I sent you ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by NcLc2010
He is currently the best at these things I know of...
To do this, simply highlight the specific text in your post and press the http://www.lbpcentral.com/forums/LBP...createlink.png-button. Then you can insert the link URL in the pop-up window, and you should be good.Quote:
Originally Posted by NcLc2010
Cheers! :D
NcLc2010, go to this link http://www.lbpcentral.com/forums/sho...+mech+tutorial to see a tutorial posted by Gilgamesh, an LBPC member and one of our local mech experts.
Oh come on: I don't hate you. :pQuote:
Originally Posted by NcLc2010
Personally I find that building mechs is one of the most challenging things you can do in lbp, which is why I've worked so hard at it. Almost all of my mech experience is with lbp1 tech and I've only done a little bit of mechwork in lbp2 (one rush job in the beta and a few experiments in the proper game that I haven't taken the time to pursue very far), but the new tools lend themselves very well to mech-work.
Here are the major tips that I can offer:
First: the strength of connectors is based on the mass of the connected object. This is important in many cases, but especially so in mech building. You might hold a mech in the air with an antigrav tweaker or dm and the walk cycle will look perfect but when you let it walk, the bolts don't move through their entire angle and the thing kinda' wobbles in weird ways and generally just bogs down. This is because the weight of the body is too much for one of the wobble bolts or perhaps the foot is too heavy to lift. Since legs are made of at least two pieces, you'll have at least one wobble bolt whose strength doesn't take the body or foot into account. The solution is to do the best you can to balance the weight of the various pieces so that the heavy parts are where they give the legs the most strength. In general, you'll want the feet, if they're not solidly glued into the rest of the leg) to be lighter so they don't put too much strain on the legs, but they need to still have enough mass to keep them from breaking when they hit the ground. Depending on what your mech is meant to do, this can be tricky (it's easier for a mech that only walks on level ground but more difficult for one that can handle less even terrain or jumping). You'll also want to keep the weight of the body as low as you can... but not so low that the mech pops up into the air every time a foot hits the ground.
Second: balance. This has largely been fixed in lbp2 with gyroscopes (though I personally prefer joystick rotators), but something to keep in mind is that the proper balance for a standing mech isn't the same as the proper balance for one walking forward or backward (obviously this is more of a problem for bipeds than quadrupeds). The feet naturally want to walk out from under the body. The gyroscope will stop this, but it will put strain on the leg mechanisms. Humans compensate unconsciously by angling their feet a bit or, especially when running, leaning into the direction they're moving, and I find it helpful to have mechs do the same. This is why I prefer joystick rotators to gyroscopes. When not moving, the joystick rotator would be set to point the body straight up, but when walking forward, it would be set to lean slightly forward (a 100% signal into the up/down input and a 50% signal into the left/right input should accomplish this nicely).
Third: traction. This one can be a huge freakin' pain to overcome if you want your mech to be able to walk at any kind of incline. All of the pieces of the mech will have inertia trying to hold them back while the foot is trying to pull the whole thing forward. The inertia of the body is going to win unless there is enough friction between the foot and the ground and, unfortunately, lbp physics being as they are, the friction is rarely enough, even with rubber feet and/or a material tweaker set to 100% friction. In lbp1, I solved this by emitting invisible dark matter behind the feet and part of the legs during the part of the walk cycle where the foot would be moving backwards and it worked pretty well (though it's hardly the ideal solution). In the beta, I used a material tweaker to make the feet sticky during the part of the walk cycle when they'd be moving backwards and unsticking them when it was time to pick the foot up and move it forward. Unfortunately, I find the sticky setting to be unreliable and my mech would often get its foot stuck at awkward angles during steps which made it look kinda' ridiculous (once again this is less of a problem if you're only dealing with level ground). My later experiments were with a touch sensor or two on the foot and a battery on the walk-sequencer ANDed into a 100% dampening gravity tweaker (so that the foot would only lock down during the right part of the walk cycle and then only if it was firmly touching the ground). I found this to be much more reliable than stickiness but, depending on what you want the mech to do, it can still be a hassle setting it up just right.
Those are the major problems that I've found. If you can get a good walk cycle going and distribute the mass properly to give your wobble bolts the strength they need, you should be able to get your mech walking on level ground pretty well. If you want it to do more, then you'll need to figure out how to give it better traction and you might need to work with balance a bit too. Incidentally, I've never gotten results that I was happy with using wobble bolts. My mechs used invisible pistons connected to invisible corner stones to make the real legs and then I added fake legs for appearance' sake. My latest experiments are with using a joystick rotator on each leg segment to turn them to the exact angles I want them at regardless of what any other parts of the mech are doing and it's showing some promise, though it's pretty tedious setting it up.
Thanks for all the help guys! and Sehven, that was just a joke. You know nobody hates me :D Just kidding, theres probably like 2 people that do :( Also, on my main mech I cant change the weight because I spent hours making it look awesome with the merge glitch :) But I think its pretty spread out in terms of weight.
Ok now seriously, thanks for the help, I'll try it out as soon as I can. :)
I was joking too. At best I'm a mech demigod... <--that's also a joke, btw :pQuote:
Originally Posted by NcLc2010
Sounds pretty cool. I've a big fan of the merge glitch and I've been experimenting with some new ways to use it in vehicle building myself (well, new to me, though I haven't heard of anybody else using it this way*). If you need to add weight, or to be more precise, mass (easily confused 'cuz they're almost the same thing in a constant gravity), to any limb sections, you can always use the merge glitch to add extra material to a piece. I haven't needed to resort to that too often but it's always an option.Quote:
Also, on my main mech I cant change the weight because I spent hours making it look awesome with the merge glitch :) But I think its pretty spread out in terms of weight.
* if you're curious, what I've been doing is embedding a wrecked looking ship made of thack metal and other thack objects/decos inside a clean version made of thick cardboard-glitched-metal. When it loses so many hitpoints, an explosion is triggered which destroys a chunk of the cardboard surface, exposing the mangled interior. This way damage is visible but doesn't completely destroy the ship (which is a problem with traditional cardboard vehicles hit by explosives). The visible damage takes the place of a health bar in letting the player know how much health they have left.