1. Alternative approach to path construction Andrew Williams http://www.bolton.ac.uk/staff/adw1

2. First construct your track

3. Next, add a car It does not matter where it goes - but I would put it on the yellow lines

4. Now, add a rock Make sure the car is selected before you add the rock. (So that the rock sits in the same position)

5. Then, clone your rock Now there are two rocks I have moved the new rock forwards

6. Now clone this second rock IMPORTANT You MUST NOT use Clone Insert

7. Here’s my new rock Again, I’ve moved it forward a bit and placed it on the yellow line

8. Here’s one I prepared earlier …

9. Notes They don’t need to be rocks specifically – Any object with geometry and a location will do They don’t need to be evenly spaced One rock must be able to “see” (ie draw an unobstructed straight line) to its neighbour The rocks are in order – Hence Clone and not Clone Insert

10. Now open the properties for the first rock and open up Notepad

11. Look at the X,Y,Z location in the property window This bit 

12. What is a path? A path is simply a series of locations around the track. – Normally you record the path yourself by driving round the track – We are going to use the locations of the rocks We don’t actually need the middle number – That represents the height above the track but we want the path on the track, so we enter 0 for that

13. The three numbers We don’t need to include all those decimal places either I would suggest that this location can be adequately represented by 0, 0, -4

14. Enter those numbers in Notepad

15. Now select the next rock and repeat That looks like 14, 0, 43 to me

16. Then grab the next rock

17. And the next …

18. Etc

19. Eventually…

20. We have created trail of breadcrumbs Add a path and delete the default nodes (ie on the right-hand side)

21. Copy-and-paste the stuff from Notepad into that box

22. Add the other bits and pieces

23. And the car follows the path Easy question: Why doesn’t it crash into the rocks?