Spinning spiral ramp: Stop from appearing to move upwards. Move more like a treadmill.

Unity Engine
1

Hey.

I know that this may be very hard to explain, but please bare with me as I have been trying to solve this problem for a long time with absolutely no luck at all. And I cannot continue developing my game without it. :confused:

I am trying to get this spiral looking ramp (see attached video) to rotate at an increasing rate of speed, while acting as sort of a “treadmill” to the ball that is in the scene. As of right now, I cannot figure out how to A: Make it appear as if the ball is rolling up the spiral ramp, and B: Make both the ball and the position of the ramp that the ball is on stay in one place on screen (right now the ramp appears to be moving up and clipping through the ball. This is due to the spiral nature of the shape of the ramp).

the best way I think there is to describe what I am trying to achieve is, I would like the ramp to appear like a “spinning treadmill” of sorts, so that the ball can roll up it, but with the camera staying in one place and the ball and piece of platform that it is colliding with/rolling on always visible.

I always tend to get away from myself when I try to explain this… I think I have done so here. I hope at least one of you understand what I am trying to accomplish. Please see the video.

Spiral Ramp from barney on Vimeo.

2

the ramp is spinning the opposite way for this to work, and textures go a long way to creating the effect, though the effect is very successfully done by a real world object, the wind spiral, as shown below. it requires that the sphere is at the center of a spiral.

3

You’ve made an auger, which will transport things upward or downward when spun, even though it doesn’t itself move up or down. In order to make a spiral escalator, you need to move the surface vertically while rotating.

It’s probably best to spawn segments at the top/bottom and have them move vertically while rotating around the center of the whole assembly, then make the segments snap back to the beginning when they reach the end. This is, in concept, how actual escalators work: send a segment up/down, then have it wrap around and head back to the bottom to do it again.