Unity 3D: Space Physics Experiments 04 - Functional Landing Gear
Over the past couple weeks I've been modeling and animating some landing gear in my spare time. 3D animation is no longer my forte, but it was a fun refresher and I learned a lot I didn't know about simple IK setups and constraints.
The previous video was the prototype of what I had in mind. The landing gear are a combination of Unity's build in Wheel Collider suspension, and animation driven suspension movement. The gear can also be retracted and extended using animations, backed by a bunch of code to control it all.
As for the final clip in the video, while dropping it to test the suspension I realized that the way I wrote the thruster logic, it should automatically counter-act gravity.
Turns out it does. I had to make the ship heavier though, otherwise it could counter gravity so well that it just sits there and powers through it. Potentially having a map or something set on a planet using the same ship you fly in space would actually be pretty easy (from a physics standpoint), and kind of interesting. That hadn’t really occurred to me before, and it seems like it would require only minimal flight control tweaks. They’re basically tweaks that I was going to make anyway because I need to be able to land comfortable in space.
As mentioned before, I don't post to Youtube at the same rate I do on my own blog. If you're curious to follow this work in more granular detail, check here:
http://why485.tumblr.com/tagged/space...
Music is "Light Up Delight" by musmus
http://musmus.main.jp/jazz.html