mac1,

I wanted to come back and thank you for all of the time you put into helping me. With your examples and the component stringer, plus a bit of planning, I was able to get the effect that I was looking for. Thank you very, very much!

@d12dozr said:

See this file for ideas...use the Scene tabs to follow the tutorial. Ask back here if you need more help!

Thanks! I'll take a peek when I get home. Much appreciated!

@mac1 said:

Several other observation:
The number must be an integer unless you will settle for a odd ball at the end and the spacing around the " curves" will need to avoid collision with adjacent parts. Real tank treads show this characteristic.

Thanks for this information mac1. I suppose then this means that if my curve radius is 2m, then 1/2 of the curve will have a circumference of 0.5 * pi * 4 = 6.28318531. So I need to have multiples of tracks in the 6 (1m tread) / 12 (0.5m tread) / 18 (0.33m tread) ratio?

@mitcorb said:

You might also- just to get a little perspective- look on youtube for constructing a wheel or tire. I was thinking if you needed this level of accuracy, using the Rotate/copy method might help solve the problem? Path segment uniformity?

I'll take a look and see what I can find. I've been doing copies of the components, but the interfacing of those components down onto the various surfaces of the tank tracks has been that's caused me grief. Thanks for the tip, though!

Thanks everyone for the offers of help - it's appreciated!

What I'm trying to accomplish is to 'weld' individual treads onto an angled surface, to represent tank treads in a water-tight model. I've a portion of my actual model to illustrate what I'm talking about.

I end up running into two problems. First, most of the time when I'm intersecting a component tread onto the track, the resultant mesh doesn't align with the tread's cross-section properly, and I have to delete the old mesh, the 'underside' of the tread, and then heal any missing nodes manually. I am pretty sure I'm missing something here, as it seems like a pretty normal operation, but I keep having issues with it.

Doing this along a curve is just infuriating as more often than not I simply have to reconstruct the better part of the object. This is where I end up getting bogged down every time I try to solve this problem.

Basically, I'd like to know if there's a more efficient way to interface these types of components onto the model, especially along the curved surfaces. Right now I'm trying to do this by moving the component into place, exploding it, and then intersecting the resultant geometry and manually editing any mesh that doesn't work out. Obviously, that's hideously tedious and any pointers would be appreciated!

@unknownuser said:

Did you want a better way to make tank tracks? Maybe this would help.

I'm looking into this, to see how I can make this work for me. Still playing with it to see if I can get my treads to align along the path properly. Thanks for the reference!

Sample geometry

@stilteg said:

It seems you are considering very small geometries ... You should consider building at 1000:1 scale and reducing it to real scale in the very end )

Sorry, forgot to mention that. I am building in meter scale and scaling with netfabb. So all of the measurements above would be in meters in Sketchup!

Greetings everyone,

I'm a software dev who's taken an interest in Sketchup as a lightweight CAD system for rapid prototyping. It's extremely quick to use, and I've been highly impressed with how quickly I can go from sketchbook to printed model via some of the print-on-demand shops out there. Mostly I'm working in the 1/144 or 15mm sci-fi market, and I've had some success with primitive buildings and accessories like basic weapons and missiles. I'm very much a 3D design newbie and I've learned mostly by doing and referencing internet sources, along with some dabbling in Blender.

I'm trying to graduate up to more advanced designs however, and the thing that constantly frustrates me is how to make solid tank-like tracks along a curved path. Because of the constraints of the RP process, minimum wall-lengths are really important, and getting the mesh to be a solid manifold has become my bane.

Essentially, I've been working with an elongated oval about 2mm long x 1mm high, and trying to apply 0.3mm X 0.2mm 'threads' on top of it.

Welding them face to face and doing an interface->to context works reasonably well for straight edges, but when I need to weld them along curved surfaces it end up generating tons of 'noise' geometry that I have to go back in and clean up. The same is true if I simply do a copy-move for the treads and manually join them by deleting faces.

I've tried to do something with the 'follow-me' tool, but that end up being laborious to sub-divide into 0.2mm long segments along the length of the track.

Am I missing something - is there an easier way to make a water-tight mesh that has gaps every so often? I know that a visual would help, and I'll try to attach a typical scene later tonight. But any thoughts on if I'm making this too complicated would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!