How to make a TANK TRACK in Maya quickly. Animated with MASH. 3 steps to get working IN YOUR SCENE

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This helps me stay awake editing more videos late at night after work.
After trying and failing to follow others tutorials on tank treads in MASH, I realised there are 3 important things you must do to your geometry and scene FIRST so that it works well In your scene.
Tutorial on parenting geometry coming soon

[@queertales]

You're missing a few steps if you want to use this for anything that doesn't just drive in a straight line at constant speed. To prevent the tracks from flipping when you rotate the tank, you need to: 1. Duplicate the curve, select the CVs on the duplicate and make it a bit larger than the original curve. 2. Add this duplicate curve as "Aim Curve". 3. In the MESH Curve node, set Roll Amount to 1. 4. Group the original curve and the aim curve together, and use the group to move the tracks around. Secondly, the Animation Speed only works if your tracks never changes speed. If you try to animate the Animation Speed, you'll see it will spin to where it would have been if had that speed from the beginning. Instead you can animate Offset Along Curve..

[@ilayaRG]

Thanks a lot for this info man.

[@teroblepuns]

SIMPLE AND TO THE POINT SAVED MY DAY FFS THANK YOUU

[@deemwinch]

Instructions unclear. When I pressed the play button, my bmp drove right out of the monitor and demolished half of my house

[@ihabiano]

I appreciate the fact that you talk about the errors and stupidity that Maya hurdles you with, such as not being able to rotate after applying MASH. Great vid! Thanks!!

[@a.richards2144]

Just wanted to let you know that ive had the freeze transformation problem for weeks now, and you are the first person to actually help me solve the problem so thank you so much!

[@CGITutorials]

Awesome, glad to hear it. Thanks.

[@luckymaki8627]

Thank you for explaining how to fix this combine-mesh-problem! It was a headache! I am so lucky to find your video 😁

[@Millu30]

Literally everything i was looking for including how to make it, how to fix issues, how to add animation and more :D

[@CGITutorials]

Thanks!

[@andrewsuttman2020]

You are a hero and a legend for this

[@slaylmaz1089]

Wow.. Thank you very much. I exactly needed this tutorial.

[@CGITutorials]

Glad it was helpful! Thanks for the comment.

[@toffeenator101]

great tutorial man, MASH is such a powerful tool. Everyone talks about Blender plugins and completely forgets Maya's MASH and BiFrost

[@CGITutorials]

Thank you very much. Yep, totally agree - I really want to learn how to do proper 3d motion graphics with MASH next.

[@yacinejulian6678]

You are so good at this bro, keep doing it...

[@CGITutorials]

Hey thanks, appreceated

[@raol635]

Wow. You cured it. So excellent 👏 👌

[@henryfive8862]

Thank you, great tutorial, just what i needed.

[@CGITutorials]

Glad it helped!

[@manasa7669]

Thank you so much!!! 😭😭 Really needed it!!

[@CGITutorials]

Glad it helped!

[@OSkengz4488]

This is wicked!!!!!!

[@hearthunter8029]

Man, big thanks to you!

[@CGITutorials]

You're welcome!

[@korobkagames1335]

It's great video, thanks!

[@CGITutorials]

Glad to help, thanks for the feedback.

[@peterasudwadia]

The last bit, where you make a copy of the MASH node, you could use the symmetry node instead. Saves the extra work if there are future changes

[@milosdikic6379]

THANK YOU!!!

[@CGITutorials]

You're welcome!

[@VertexMachina]

The tip about changing scale was really helpful for me. I was also working in meters, which seems to cause MASH curves to be placed very far away from the center of the workspace.

[@CGITutorials]

I know! It honestly took me hours to figure some of these steps out. Mash (and maya in general) is very unforgiving. Thanks for feedback and glad it helped!

[@devilsforkdigital1490]

@@CGITutorials I don't know why you would need to work in meters. Maya always calculates in centimeters no matter what units you choose. Better to always leave that alone.

It would be great to see a tutorial for modelling of that single piece please.. thanks

[@kineticraptor3318]

How the hell do you get such pretty lighting in your viewport

[@CGITutorials]

I am going to do a 1 minute video answer to your question soon, but in the meantime I cover it in the first 4.5 minutes of this video here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eGOahJV-mruVn5o. Basically assign an AI standard surface, set the preset to chrome or something, and then add an hdri image to the arnold skydome, turn the viewport lightbulb on and it looks really nice. Hope that helps!

[@earlskjoldager607]

Great video, thank you. One question are you still going to make the Tutorial on parenting geometry?

[@vanesieg6772]

greetings, to this animation with the mesh tool can I add a controller and move it with it?

[@Talha-hg4sl]

You can change the rotation of treads by selecting the object that is grayed in hierarchy and rotate

[@typhoonno6]

Thank you for the Teaching film. May I ask about How do I turn my tank tread in the animation? When I turn it, its angle will reverse inside out.

[@lowerechelongamers8280]

Look at how tanks turn irl

[@sovpenguin289]

I have small sections of track where roughly 3-5 pieces are inverted (as in, the bottom faces up) any ideas for a fix?

[@cyberdude4]

How would you animate the treads to slow down and stop?

[@faklr3482]

Its but how i could rig this ? I mean if i want to use reverse Ik in Unreal Engine 4 to make tank trail blend if the tank move on a rock for instance how i could do it ?

[@lordgains3317]

Can you please help me, I made my tracks perfectly it's come out amazing but it's slowed my PC down like crazy and is using up a ton of ram... I duno if its due to the fact I have so many objects in my scene now or if it's due to me using MASH to create the tracks but I've also duplicated my MASH tracks x3 and then combined the 3 tracks with my wheel objects and I it's just made maya so slow that I can't really work anymore. I also have to say I have a really beefy PC so I can't understand why this is happening, along with 32GB of RAM. If you have any advice I'd greatly appreciate it.

[@shiv3375]

Hey sir i am having issues regarding posting my model on skecthfab i created a tank and treads using mash but when i upload over there it dosn't show the treads also the one mesh that u use to create treads which u can hide in maya is also visible in sketchfab can you tell me what do i do?

[@gordonbengtsson1571]

Everytime the timeline ends the tracks go back to their original position. Anyway to just have it spin endlessly without any stuttering?

[@jimlonghurst4577]

Do you know how to slow down the animation speed over time? E.g I want the tracks to run at full speed, then slow down to a stop. Simply key framing the speed attribute is giving me weird results. (popping on and off, e.t.c). Even adding a time warp gives unexpected results.

[@CGITutorials]

Unfortunately I had issues trying that too which is super annoying. To be honest, anything other than a continuous looping animation at a steady speed would be better off done with a proper rig like this 1 hour tutorial: kzbin.info/www/bejne/iJrVqIiolrieba8&ab_channel=NGEN

[@vanesieg7097]

How do you get the chain to stay warm?

[@AhornSyrup]

The original mesh gets hidden when you use MASH. So, you just have to find the hidden original mesh and adjust it (rotate, scale) to fit the thing.

[@matthewtheobald627]

Is there any way to animate it if your treads are a single object?

[@CGITutorials]

The only thing I can think of is to either separate them for this method or if you have your treads in a straight line, you could play with deform>nonlinear>bend or something similar. I would only know how to get an oval shape, or half of a pill shape of animated tracks with this method.

[@ProjectIdeal]

what material you using??

[@CGITutorials]

I am using an AIstandard surface which is reflecting an arnold skydome which I have hidden from the viewport. I will be showing how to do this in another tutorial soon.

[@SUSSYMEMES]

Still didnt work for me :( tracks just never follow the path of the curve I set no matter what I do

[@nbgproductions7363]

mine never snaps to the curve it just shoot out of it any ideas why?

[@Aleks1997love]

Did you make sure to do what he did at 9:50? Also are you working in meters or centimeters? For me only when I changed to centimeters did the tracks snap to the curve properly. Good luck friend!

[@killerboomx]

Is it possible to mirror the thread and also have the animation ?

[@CGITutorials]

yes, you can duplicate special and click on it's option box and check the box for duplicate input graph and it should work

[@killerboomx]

@@CGITutorials i was thinking of mirroring ( because is not symmetrical)the polygon and hopefully the animation stays for the mirrored poly and it works ! the mirrored poly mirrors the movement i do to the original curve. hope u get what i meant

[@hmm-zd7ux]

What is your pc configuration ?

[@CGITutorials]

i7-8086K 12Core@4ghz, GTX1080 Founders, 32GB RAM, SSD, Z370I Mobo, phanteks evolv shift mini case

[@oscarworxli349]

When I do this in Maya, the tracks will go somewhere else, they wouldn't stick on the curve, anyone knows why that happens?

[@CGITutorials]

I had that problem for several hours too and it really annoyed me, after lots of troubleshooting I made the steps for this vid. All I can say is to delete everything and try again from scratch following every step in the video, sometimes the second / third time is the charm! Mash is annoyingly finniky and I hope they can make it more user friendly soon.

[@nitishmishra191]

How to rig this

[@CGITutorials]

Hi, I unfortunately do not know how to rig yet. This 75 minute tutorial series will show you how to do it properly: kzbin.info/www/bejne/bIu5nn9-pbqpsKM&ab_channel=SimonMills As a teacher I can only learn new stuff during 4 week summer holidays! Hopefully this year I can learn rigging.

[@nitishmishra191]

@@CGITutorials this tutorial is not doing with mash editor

[@FictionCautious]

From your tutorial, Maya feels like a cold, calculated and unforgiving piece of code.