Creating curved rails for a cart-ride-game that maintain the same distance apart

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#1

I decided to have a go at making a simple cart-ride game for fun, with everything being made from scratch (cart, track / rails, etc).

One of the issues that has just struck me is I have no idea how to properly curve the tracks. Right now all I’m using is a part.

My first method was to use Archimedes Two, and just curve it that way. One side works fine, but of course, if I just clone the left curve and move it to the right, the two tracks will get closer together and be very tight and almost meet.

Obviously, I need to keep the tracks the same distance apart when they curve, or the cart will just derail and glitch out. I’m guessing there must be a straight-forward way of achieving this, since many games have something similar.

How would I achieve this?

#2

You could make the curve segments finer (shorter distance, gradual curve)
Or do the painful but straightforward solution of just resizing the rails manually for them to join together precisely.
(sorry for the really barebones response, more clarification on your issue would help!)

#3

I’m not sure if archimendes supports unions, but you can try using those and then separate them when you’re done.

#4

I’ve done this before with sections of track. I only had the 2 rails, no rail ties or added structure.
I used the Archimedes Plugin, got the outer rails formed perfectly, then used the SBS plugin by Fractality to shorten all the selected inner rails by their center. If you use an increment of .001 you can do it and get an almost seamless result. You’ll have to fine tune the end rails of the inner curve because they don’t match the straight rails, but it doesn’t take too long.