Motion Tracking

Not sure about the title, if you have a better name for this controllers please say so.

What I’m trying to do is make two controllers that control a visual object to track a point in 3D space.

the first one is what I think I know how to do and will explain better what I need for the second, more problematic controller,
what I have is a floating camera over an arena hovering over the player units (max 6ish, TBD), each unit has a camera tracking it, I want to have a drone graphic where the camera is, to give more immersion, it’s okay if it’s not perfectly over the point(withing say 1 unit).
What I though of doing is making the drone graphic just correspond to the ‘velocity’ of the point to give the impression of accelerating/braking with some threshold for distance and the ‘velocity’ of the drone to determine where to point, pretty simple stuff really, but it means the drone engines are locked in place and its “controlled” by tweaking the power on each engine to re-orient, I was wondering if anyone has a clue how to do one where the engines gimbal.

the second one is making spider-legs that follow a point to a pretty much exact position(a minor deviation is okay but nothing visible), it’s gonna be for replacing tank tracks, but I suppose such a controller can be applied to many different things.
this one really stumps me, the “obvious” route is to do it with IK, but how would you do that?
the only thing I can think of is watching a bunch of spider videos (and I have somewhat of a phobia of all insects, especially from spiders, I just twitch in my chair a bit watching a video, haha), figure out how to puppeteer it and translate that to IK code.
but that seems really complicated regardless of my unreasonable fear.

any one here have any experience with that stuff?

You could drive and steer your spider using an oscillator. This guy GitHub - etienne-p/UnityHexapodSimulator: Hexapod robot prototyping using Unity does that for a hexapod, but the same principle should apply to eight legs too. I’ve used his oscillator setup for training a deep learning model GitHub - mbaske/robot-ants: Robot Ants Demo made with Unity Machine Learning Agents

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Very interesting, thank you for the link, I looked though the code a few times, nothing strikes me as obvious in how it works, but I guess I’ll just need the weekend to actually play around with it.
I don’t actually care if it’s 8 or 6 legs, my ideal solution would take one base/core graphic and one leg graphic with a selector from say 3 to 8 legs.

Well, just make the engine graphics rotate and not the whole drone, you big dummy.
lol.

Can anyone suggest some good key words to look for because other than “spider legs” I can’t think of how to call it and i’m pulling blanks here.