I was playing today, and came up with this guy from my past. I always LOVED the album cover, and wanted a "toy" of him I could play with. He doesn't have "real" textures yet... just some tossed on him for looks... Can poser animate tank treads? I know how to do it in lightwave, but I don't think poser can handle it...

Tarkus, by ELP. Never cared for their work, but there you go; tis a fine model. Yes, Poser can animate tank treads, but IIRC it's a bit of a pain in the hind end. I believe ockhman is yer man for such stuff. The Poser Technical forum may be your best bet.

Yipes! Talk about a fast response! Under 2 minutes! LOL!! I was wondering if anyone knew the character's name... LOL!! I haven't had the album for years, but came across the image on the web. I wanted a good pic of him for desktop wallpaper, SO... Still need to come up with a good armor plating map for his shell... wish I knew what the other characters look like..

VK has a very math-intensive ERC technique, using variable centers of rotation, which he explains over in the Poser Technical forum. He is too smart for me. :( But his process works. I think he posted it back in November. There is also a post in this (the Poser Forum) forum, in which he posts a sample file that was not included on his tutorial page in the Poser Tech. I have made treads work, using a bit of a kludge, rotating a cylider through magnet deformer zones to fake a rubberized tread effect. My technique is included in my Microtron file: http://www.kuroyumes-developmentzone.com/~Cage/Microtron.zip

My UFO series Mobile has tank tracks. Each track is a separate part. It has a morph to move each track segment to where the next segment was. To make the tracks animate:- - Make up a movie-pose for the track where the "move track" morph changes from 0 to 1 - Use that movie-pose as a repeatable walk, if Poser lets you. If the "move track" morph is set to Y to time 0, if the tracks roll at X segments per time unit, then at time T the "move track" morph should be set to (Y+XT)-integralpart(Y+XT) :: remember to round towards minus infinity.

With Poser 5, you could also use an animated displacement map on some smooth treads, provided the treads are UV-mapped for such trickery.

I thought of the dissplacement map, but I actually modeled one tread section, and rail cloned it along the tread path, to get real treads. Since he's more of a static image character for me, I'll probably just abandon the tread working idea. The treads don't follow a simple capsule shape, but a more complexe trapazoid shape. If someone wants to take a crack at it, once I finish textureing him, I'll release him. BTW COOL that there's a Microtron poser model! ;)

Here's the original cover, for comparison

Heres another way to do it without actually movingthe treads. using a stop-motion techique. Model four different tank treads each a 1/5 further ahead then the other such that if you were make only one visible at a time: 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4 It looks liek its moving Instead on using the "Visibel" property yo can also use a shader to make it visible. (Oh and by the way in teh original it looks like eth armadillo's nostrils are cannons)

Yeah, I haven't finished the head modelling yet. I just frozen the subcage so I could see what he was starting to look like in poser. When I posted the picture, I also noticed that his shell rear shape looks like it covers the back treads more then I've modelled. If I remember right, the ablum had more then just this pic of him in it, and if I could get those other pics for reference, I could make him more accurate. This was only 1 day's work so far, so I'm happy with what I accomplished in about 4 hours or so...