Archive: 14 posts

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Well, by popular demand, I've decided to make a follow-up to my Bipedal Motion thread (https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=p=137092). Here I will be discussing exclusively about the different methods of balancing your contraption which I have either experimented with or seen other people use. I'd like to start out by saying that, in all cases, you are much better off making your feet out of heavier material than the legs and the rest of your contraption. Also try to keep the proportions of your upper body in line with the proportions of your legs. A big body with tiny legs will be almost impossible to balance correctly. There's nothing much to describe, you have to attempt to make your contraption stand by itself by adjusting its forward and backward weight perfectly in accordance to the game's physics engine. No tricks, but an engineering degree is probably necessary to achieve this. Pros : If you manage to use this method, you are a mechanical genius and should be out making a real-life versions of your biped. Cons : Requires extreme precision (or extraordinary luck) and a lot of minute adjustments to the weight and shape of your contraption. It's also very time consuming. Link : https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=t=10264 This is a lot like Physics Balancing, except you cheat by making the upper body out of the lightest materials possible. You can even include pieces of peach floaty hidden inside to make the entire contraption almost as light as air. Pros : This method should be fairly straightforward. The lighter the top of your creation, the more it will tend to stay upright. Cons : The motion will be affected by the fact that your contraption is so light. It will move like a feather and you'll lose a significant amount of grip from the feet the lighter the contraption is. A glass rail is placed high in the sky. On this rail, a piece of material with a stiff, 0-strength, invisible piston drops down to hold the contraption upright. Pros : Your contraption will keep perfect balance all the time. It creates the perfect illusion that the creation is standing up on its own. Cons : The glass rail needs to extend the entire level, otherwise the contraption falls down. Link : https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=t=4568 A long, thin piece of glass is added to the base of the feet to keep the contraption from falling over. If the piece is made thin enough, it can be made invisible. Pros : It's very easy to make and tweak, and your contraption should keep its balance fairly well. Cons : It probably doesn't handle slopes and bumps very well, so it will mostly run only on long, flat surfaces. Link : YouTube - Little big planet MGS rex MK4 and 3.1 A gyro detects which way the contraption is tilted and tilts the entire upper body in the opposite direction to keep it straight. Pros : Like with Physics Balancing, if you manage this you are a mechanical genius and should move to Japan to help in their secret mecha projects. Cons : Making a working gyro which works with the contraption's balance-restoring mechanics takes ages of tweaking to accomplish. Very time-consuming. A quadruped is much more stable, easier to balance and reliable than a biped. Why settle for one pair of legs when you can have two? Pros : Fewer headaches than making a biped. Cons : It's not a biped. A block of Peach Floaty is hung in the air above your contraption with an invisible, 0-strength piston connecting the two. Pros : It is an easy way to make your contraption stay upright and not look completely ridiculous. Cons : It is tricky to get exactly the right amount of floaty, and the contraption will occasionally rock back and forth. Well, I hope this gives you some leads on how to get your creation to stay upright. Gravity is a fierce adversary, and ingenuity and perseverance are the best weapons to use against it. If you have any comments or other methods to suggest, be sure to mention them and I'll try to add them up here.

2009-02-03 16:26:00 Author: Gilgamesh Posts: 2536

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Well, by popular demand, I've decided to make a follow-up to my Bipedal Motion thread (https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=p=137092). Here I will be discussing exclusively about the different methods of balancing your contraption which I have either experimented with or seen other people use. I'd like to start out by saying that, in all cases, you are much better off making your feet out of heavier material than the legs and the rest of your contraption. Also try to keep the proportions of your upper body in line with the proportions of your legs. A big body with tiny legs will be almost impossible to balance correctly. There's nothing much to describe, you have to attempt to make your contraption stand by itself by adjusting its forward and backward weight perfectly in accordance to the game's physics engine. No tricks, but an engineering degree is probably necessary to achieve this. Pros : If you manage to use this method, you are a mechanical genius and should be out making a real-life versions of your biped. Cons : Requires extreme precision (or extraordinary luck) and a lot of minute adjustments to the weight and shape of your contraption. It's also very time consuming. This is a lot like Physics Balancing, except you cheat by making the upper body out of the lightest materials possible. You can even include pieces of peach floaty hidden inside to make the entire contraption almost as light as air. Pros : This method should be fairly straightforward. The lighter the top of your creation, the more it will tend to stay upright. Cons : The motion will be affected by the fact that your contraption is so light. It will move like a feather and you'll lose a significant amount of grip from the feet the lighter the contraption is. A glass rail is placed high in the sky. On this rail, a piece of material with a stiff, 0-strength, invisible piston drops down to hold the contraption upright. Pros : Your contraption will keep perfect balance all the time. It creates the perfect illusion that the creation is standing up on its own. Cons : The glass rail needs to extend the entire level, otherwise the contraption falls down. Link : https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=t=4568 A long, thin piece of glass is added to the base of the feet to keep the contraption from falling over. If the piece is made thin enough, it can be made invisible. Pros : It's very easy to make and tweak, and your contraption should keep its balance fairly well. Cons : It probably doesn't handle slopes and bumps very well, so it will mostly run only on long, flat surfaces. Link : YouTube - Little big planet MGS rex MK4 and 3.1 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GgZFsxz7Kc) A gyro detects which way the contraption is tilted and tilts the entire upper body in the opposite direction to keep it straight. Pros : Like with Physics Balancing, if you manage this you are a mechanical genius and should move to Japan to help in their secret mecha projects. Cons : Making a working gyro which works with the contraption's balance-restoring mechanics takes ages of tweaking to accomplish. Very time-consuming. A quadruped is much more stable, easier to balance and reliable than a biped. Why settle for one pair of legs when you can have two? Pros : Fewer headaches than making a biped. Cons : It's not a biped. Well, I hope this gives you some leads on how to get your creation to stay upright. Gravity is a fierce adversary, and ingenuity and perseverance are the best weapons to use against it. If you have any comments or other methods to suggest, be sure to mention them and I'll try to add them up here. I combined the methods of rail and floaty balancing. i made a block of peach floaty in the air and connected it to my almost entirely wood mech with a zero-strength invisible piston. It works almost perfectly! pros:it is an easy way to make your mech stay walking or whatever you are doing and not look completely ridiculous. cons:it is tricky to get exactly the right amount of floaty, and the mech will occasionally rock back and forth making it look drunk or something tips: -with my mech i ended up making pointed, half-glass toes and mostly rubber feet which keeps the mech from tripping on it's own toes and still gives it grip.clumsy -before balancing a mech make sure that you have all the pieces there and assembled. -also I found it easier on the mech if you have the feet trying to stay parallel to the lower leg rather than perpendicular this helped my mech to not drag his heels

2009-02-04 04:23:00 Author: The Comedian Posts: 113

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Hm I never thought of making a 0 strength piston for that . That's great. I think I might try my hand on some physics balancing, stubborn as I am. If I ever want to make a mech you'll probably see me back here on how to properly kill myself..

2009-02-04 08:04:00 Author: Wyth Posts: 263

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I combined the methods of rail and floaty balancing. i made a block of peach floaty in the air and connected it to my almost entirely wood mech with a zero-strength invisible piston. It works almost perfectly! pros:it is an easy way to make your mech stay walking or whatever you are doing and not look completely ridiculous. cons:it is tricky to get exactly the right amount of floaty, and the mech will occasionally rock back and forth making it look drunk or something tips: -with my mech i ended up making pointed, half-glass toes and mostly rubber feet which keeps the mech from tripping on it's own toes and still gives it grip.clumsy -before balancing a mech make sure that you have all the pieces there and assembled. -also I found it easier on the mech if you have the feet trying to stay parallel to the lower leg rather than perpendicular this helped my mech to not drag his heels Good suggestion, thanks a lot. I've put it up in the first post.

2009-02-04 11:14:00 Author: Gilgamesh Posts: 2536

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Good suggestion, thanks a lot. I've put it up in the first post. actually it's not as good as it seems depending on what you want the mech to do. I ended up putting a small glass track hovering under my balloon to keep the mech form falling nearly flat on it's face if you boost for to long or hit something while boosting. That and the glass track keeps the mech from doing that drunken thing i was talking about (well mostly)

2009-02-05 05:54:00 Author: The Comedian Posts: 113

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The video that is shown in method 4 has some interesting points. Barring hidden weighting material or the use of a cowglitch, the entire body is made of cardboard, the lightest non-floaty material avaliable. Glass is I think 10 times heavier than cardboard off memory, so that's giving it more mass in it's feet. Also keep in mind how much your legs are bent. If you go for a bird hip with backward knees you are less expected to have the joints fully extend into an upright position, giving an overall lower center of gravity. The one in the video if you look at the joints is seriously bent, to the point where the ankles and knees are at around the same height as the head. Elongating the ankle joint can also do this. If you look at, say, a cat or dog's back legs, they are still lizard hipped like ours but their ankle joints are actually around where our knees are. They just walk on the forefoot where their "paws" are. You can tell this is the case by finding their "thumb", it's actually on the same place as the human thigh. You don't need to disect animals to work this out. So they have a small front foot (you would probably need an extra joint in LBP), a large back foot to the ankle, and then similar lengthed lower and upper legs. Another thing to consider with method 6 is that of a triped, 3 legged thing. Using the three planes of LBP, you could have a leg extend out the front in the middle plane. This won't really work for most animals, but if you are making a robot of fantasy creature it does not matter so much how many limbs it has. It's a great guide though. Remember, as Gilgamesh said, center of gravity is the key, and having a low mass at the base of the object can really help achieve this.

2009-02-05 06:13:00 Author: Elbee23 Posts: 1280

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actually it's not as good as it seems depending on what you want the mech to do. I ended up putting a small glass track hovering under my balloon to keep the mech form falling nearly flat on it's face if you boost for to long or hit something while boosting. That and the glass track keeps the mech from doing that drunken thing i was talking about (well mostly) As long as it works. I've used your method to test out the walking motion on my latest biped. Just hung a giant block of floaty to the mech with a string to see if it would actually be able to walk forward and backward. This way I didn't need to hook up the whole glass rail system to it just to see if it walked straight.

2009-02-05 11:47:00 Author: Gilgamesh Posts: 2536

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i was looking at all the methods and thought that the glass ski method might work better on hills if it had very stiff sprung bolts attaching two skis to a rubber bottomed foot like the pic. I'm planing on trying this method with a more humanoid looking mech. http://www.lbpcentral.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=272&pictureid=2222 hope it's easy enough to understand if not feel free to ask yes it will walk just fine without the glass track but i find that if you want it to be able to boost then you want the glass track and i finished the little control thing to make the mech walk for ward and back but had to make some small adjustments to the feet for it to walk backwards without messing up. Thanks gil! by the way i wanted to ask you this, What method did you use for your own mech?

2009-02-06 00:31:00 Author: The Comedian Posts: 113

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I use the glass rail method exclusively. I've given my mechs the ability to fly up using rockets, so any other method would mean the thing would flip in midair any time the rockets fired. Plus it gives me a convenient place to hide all the control mechanisms.

2009-02-06 03:11:00 Author: Gilgamesh Posts: 2536

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I use the glass rail method exclusively. I've given my mechs the ability to fly up using rockets, so any other method would mean the thing would flip in midair any time the rockets fired. Plus it gives me a convenient place to hide all the control mechanisms. i attached rockets to my mech with the balloon system and it worked just fine it actually works better than walking does so i lowered the time available to boosting. do you know the guy's psn who made the rex? EDIT nvm i figured it out and i was wrong about what i said i thought the mkII was the mark2 not what he gave me oh well i's still cool

2009-02-06 03:59:00 Author: The Comedian Posts: 113

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Despite my 8 1/2 (I'm in 9th grade o.O) year education, I'm going to attempt gyro balancing. Wish me luck. (Don't worry, If it doesn't work, I can play Zorro's Suicide Factory. ;p)

2009-04-05 19:23:00 Author: SawronZXZ Posts: 463

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Gilgamesh, this is a great thread and your tips helped me a great deal. I tried and tried but just couldn't put it all together until now. Here's a video to show what I was able to put together just this morning in an hour using what I learned in your 2 threads on bipeds. Check out the hitch in his giddyup. It's still crude, but it's all making sense to me now. Thanks a lot. YouTube - LBP Full Humanoid Biped Walker Mech I've improved on it quite a bit so I updated the video to reflect that.

2009-04-06 14:57:00 Author: muckypops Posts: 26

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Gilgamesh, this is a great thread and your tips helped me a great deal. I tried and tried but just couldn't put it all together until now. Here's a video to show what I was able to put together just this morning in an hour using what I learned in your 2 threads on bipeds. Check out the hitch in his giddyup. It's still crude, but it's all making sense to me now. Thanks a lot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1lt097rROs Wow, that looks so funny and yet awesome at the same time. Is it staying upright by itself? Pretty impressive if it is. Glad I could help.

2009-04-06 15:15:00 Author: Gilgamesh Posts: 2536

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Yep, it walks from one end of the level to the other every time. I tried improving it, but maybe I just got lucky (oops)

2009-04-06 17:08:00 Author: muckypops Posts: 26

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