   How to animate tank tracks in game engine
  does anyone know how to make a tank track animation work in the game engineI want to create tank track animation in 3D game, not just animate texture.Some programmer propose using the skeletal animation.Is that method valid. Is there other methods to realize it.In 3ds max, tank track animation is relative trival. But that is not for real time application.If using skeletal aniamtion,how to control the different rotation direction of tracks accoring to tank's forward or backward.I am an OpenGL Programmer. Thanks advance.   
  I have seen a lot of track simulations in ODE. There are a lot of videos/tutorials on youtube.I guess it's relatively easy to make with any engine.But you could also use an animated texture in combination with a morphing track mesh. Just like in my simulator (my signature).If you make parallax mapping too, you can make pretty cool track IMHO. Ah, and "my method" is fast as lightning.As for the rotation direction stuff:You should handle the two tracks independently. I mean you should calculate the position and rotation of the tank from the two tracks' parameters (speed), not vice versa.That way you can perfectly simulate the behavior/steering of the tank, and it will be very easy to control the track-texture animation.   ;  I wouldnt call real tank tracks easy.Unless you did just animate the texture, parallax mapping would be nifty looking.Note if you use a connected string of models youll still have to somehow draw it in a single batch, cause id imagine drawing a whole tracks worth of models would be a waste of batches if you did a batch a track.I remember I almost did it once, like I at least placed the individual tracks but I didnt animate it, I probably did draw it a batch a single track element, that would be good if you didnt have a thousand tanks to draw, depends on what your doing.but I guess it would be like a physics simulation (especially if you want things like hang and wheel suspension) involving a connected chain of model locations and orientations.Like I said, depending on the realism you want this could be a nightmare.My short advice- Get good at game physics before you tackle it, like you should at least be able to do a good realistic car first.And I reckon you should just animate the texture if the camera is not going to be right up the tanks ass, otherwise it would just be a waste of time.   