Creation of a wheel without suspension?

[Beale]

I'm interested in designing a very basic radial wheel, that you can attach to the underside of vehicles.

Like this (Wheels in white)

The wheels would attach from their centre and would "Clip" into the underside of any fuselage (not a big deal for me)

With this design, I don't think suspension is needed / would complicate things too much.

So I ask, is it possible to skip the overly complex suspension setup seen in stock wheels, while still maintaining steering?

Thanks for any responses!

[nli2work]

you'd still need wheelcolliders for it to roll. it'd just be a wheelcollider with suspension travel of 0; for steering you have option of using ModuleWheel or ModuleSteering. multiple wheelcollider per model is workable, but they need unique names and you need to set them up with multiple wheelModules in the config file.

I'd suggest making a single wheel part like a swivel wheel that's attached to the box.

[Beale]

you'd still need wheelcolliders for it to roll. it'd just be a wheelcollider with suspension travel of 0; for steering you have option of using ModuleWheel or ModuleSteering. multiple wheelcollider per model is workable, but they need unique names and you need to set them up with multiple wheelModules in the config file.

I'd suggest making a single wheel part like a swivel wheel that's attached to the box.

Thankyou, thats quite helpful advice.

I have been using a mesh collider for the wheel, and it hasn't been working.

Do you mean I should be using an actual Unity wheel collider?

Thanks.

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

Al l of what nli said plus, the visible components of suspension you see in squad and many others are just eye candy, in that apart from looking cool they do nothing, well that's not exactly rue the do follow the wheel collider suspension movement, AS it is in the wheel collider that the actual suspension element is carried out.

With that said you could still allow suspension movement to keep things smooth, the wheels would just go up and down in the box, one important thing to note here is that you will be mostly using named game objects for your project I'd expect you'd only need a basic wheel model and the rest would be empty game objects, the latest craze for hovering stuff takes this one step further and removes the wheel model completely and just has named game objects and colliders.

The following are the names for the game objects you will need to make a functional wheel, unfortunately missing any out makes things behave badly.

suspensionTraverse

suspensionNeutralPoint

trackSteering

steering

wheelCollider

collisionEnhancer

And everything in that list apart from collisionEnhancer and trackSteering are at exactly the same point in 3d space

[nli2work]

Thankyou, thats quite helpful advice.

I have been using a mesh collider for the wheel, and it hasn't been working.

Do you mean I should be using an actual Unity wheel collider?

Thanks.

meshcollider could possibly work if you set the angular drag way down in config file; but you won't get any real steering to speak of. and the wheels won't roll; they would just slide around.

the way I'd do it is using modulelandinggear actually. unless you want the wheels to be powered, in which case I think you have to use ModuleWheel; or a plugin. moduleLandingGear is about 5% easier to setup than ModuleWheel; with the steering bit as a separate module.

keep in mind the required parts can be empty game object. they more likely than not are. so for example you want no suspension, then you simply unchild the wheels from suspensionTraverse object. the object will merrily move up and down, not caring what's moving, or not moving, along with it.

also remember setting a collider to WheelCollidersIgnore layer will make the object invisible. You need to create a child game object to the mesh and assign the collider to the child object.

Edited August 24, 2014 by nli2work