Battle RC

Battle RC

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Custom Bot Basics
By Okamifan1
This guide will describe how to make custom bots in Battle RC.
   
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Starting Out
First you will need to use TinkerCAD[www.tinkercad.com], it's free but you will need to make an account to use it. If you already have one log into your account.

Next click on the button that says Create as shown in the image below.



Now once the button has been clicked on you should see the following on your screen.


Now we are ready to move onto the next step.
Building A Bot in TinkerCAD
Lets start with a basic 4WD Lifter, nothing too fancy. First lets make a box shaped base.
You can resize it by dragging the little squares around, and move it up and down by dragging the arrow.

Alternatively as seen in the image below you can click on the square and click on a number to change its value.

Copy/Paste Button & Simple Mirroring
After halving the size of the box, lets learn another function of TinkerCAD.

Clicking on the circled button will instantly copy and paste the highlighted part or parts, useful for mirroring which we will do in the next image.

After dragging the left corner as shown the CAD should look like this:

The best way to make the rectangle look like the one on the left side is to change the width value to be identical to the one it was copied from after dragging it. In this case the value will be changed to 55.00.
It should now look like this.

More Advanced Chassis Work
Next up we will be changing the width of both of the squares to get a gap for the lifter, lets start by placing another cube down, try placing it then moving it to the circled area below.
Next we will adjust the sides of the two initial cubes, gotta have room for the lifter to fit and move, the result should look something like this.

While doing this lets add two wedges and stretch them so they fit the chassis edges where the cubes end at the front of our bot. Select the wedges from the shapes menu.By now you know how to scale and shape things so im just going to show you what the chassis should look like by now with both the wedges on.
Adding Wheels & The Hole Tool
Now lets get a bit more in depth, lets add wheels before we add the weapon.
To start lets add a wheel shaft, make sure its a seperate color from the body and weapon, highlight and add the cylinder shape, do this four times then shift click all four cylinders and color them light blue. Make sure the cylinders are positioned like so.
You can resize the bottom of the cylinder, lets set its height to 15.00 via the circled node.Rotate the camera back up then do the same on the top only this time setting the height to 10.00 and deselect the four cylinders by clicking on a non selected piece such as one of the wedges, the CAD should now look like this.

Let's individually resize the cylinders, select one and do the same process you just did earlier, only with the left and right nodes. 15 first then 10, repeat this for each of the cylinders. It should look like this.
These axles are too long, lets shorten them, select the circled node after shift clicking the cylinders on one side and set the length to 3.00. Do the same for the other sideafter doing that it should now look like this.

Lets actually add the wheels now, add more cylinders and reshape the nodes so that the start of the cylinders are resting on the end of the wheel shafts like the picture below.
Important: Recolor each of the cylinders different from each other, the body, shaft, and weapon otherwise the wheels won't work you should have this:

Lets learn about the hole tool, add a ring shape in the same way you have been adding cylinders and shift click+drag the selected node to 14, note how it scales when shift clicked.Manipulate the width of the ring until it is at 1.00 and centered on the cylinder then click on the circled button that says hole. This is what the result should be.

Do the same for all cylinders and we now have wheels.
Building The Weapon
Lets start by making a weapon shaft, its basically the same process as the wheel shaft, same color too, only now since we know shift click+drag we can set the shape size to 13 so lets just see the results.
Weapon shaft in place we need to make the starting point of our lifting arm, this will be in a seperate color from the rest of the lifting arm for reasons we will get into once the bot is in Bot RC's bot lab. Let's setup a custom color for it say the hex value #f5831b.Now lets finish the lifting arm, lets set that color to TinkerCAD's default orange which has a hex value just slightly different enough from the arm start to not cause issues down the road.

Let's also highlight everything we built so far and raise the whole build by 1.00 so that the wheels are not dipping below the bottom of the grid.Oops, we created a problem, we now have a large amount of ground clearance, the bots in Battle RC can easily exploit this, lets add some forks, here's my configuration of forks but you are being set on your own to design them on your tutorial bot using all the knowledge you have learned so far..
Let's move onto the next step, actually getting your botr from TinkerCAD into the game.
Importing to Battle RC
Phew, that was a long section wasn't it? This one will be shorter I promise. First off create a CADS folder in My Documents, this isn't necessary but super helpful due to the way TinkerCAD exports things. Now that we've created it lets make a folder called TutorialBot in your newly made CADS folder.

Now that that's done let's go back to TinkerCAD for the last time, make sure the wedge side is facing the back of the CAD, for some reason the game registers that side as the front, this may change in future updates. Click the button that says Export and you should get the following menu.

Select the option .OBJ and it should download your CAD, now drag the contents of the zip file into the TutorialBot folder you created earlier and finally we can boot up Battle RC.
Once in Battle RC, go to Workshop, and select New Bot from the dropdown menu, the game's GUI will look like this.
Click on Import and navigate to the folder where our .OBJ file we downloaded earlier is.Load it in, and this is how it should look.Now let's move onto the next section, finalizing your bot.
Finishing Up Your Bot
Body & Wheels
That's a bit too big, lets scale it down so its more inline with the size of the bots in the game. Drag the scale factor slider down to 0.024 then hit next. You should get the following menu. Looks complex, but it's actually quite simple. It's a drag n drop system, each separate color in the CAD represents a seperate part when put into the game, this is why I was telling you to color certain things differently. Let's start with the wheels, drag all four into the menu section titled Wheels, simply click on the wheels and drag the corresponding menu item into said tab, this should be what you get.
Next up lets work on the body, this will form your bots health pool in game as well as help you get under and pin opponents. Drag everything but the lifter and wheels into this tab, we should end up with this.
The Weapon
Notice how we don't have a tab to drag our lifting arm into? Let's change that, click on the menu item called tinker and on the right menu change the weapon value to 1 (for multi weaponed bots you increase the value but since we only have a lifter we don't have to worry about that).

Notice we now have a new tab called Weapon0. Drag the weapon's pivot point and only the pivot point in first, we'll deal with the rest of the lifter shortly.
Now click on Weapon0 and on the right menu click on Set Pivot to Center.Now lets finish adding the rest of the lifter to Weapon0.

Painting, Materials, and Colliders
Our bot doesn't look that great, lets fix that. Also while we are at it we should add some colliders so it can function properly. lets go over every part and modify their colors and colliders setting everything but the wheels to Convex.

Set the body to metal and wheels to matte and paint to your choosing, I typically paint all wheels the same color but you can do whatever you want here. When you go to change the color of a part of the robot you will get this color wheel.You can change the values of the color manually via the numbers at the bottom of the color wheel as well, this is the color scheme I went with.

Finalizing the Bot
Hit next and you should get this menu.
First lets go into the Weapon0 menu and change the weapon type to Arm, change the speed to 200, max angle to 90, trigger delay to 0, and both retract delay and cooldown to 1.

For 4wd bots such as this Foam or Plastic wheels are a better option than rubber, chose one of those two. I chose foam.
Hit save.

Testing & Final Tweaks
You should find yourself now in a garage with a few items, and a bot called Bulldozer, this bot is driveable and you can test your weapon power on it and use its lifting arm to flip your robot in order to test your self righting.Let's try driving over to Bulldozer... Well we seem to be a bit sluggish. Don't worry you can still make tweaks in testing, lets alter our speed and turn speed. Let's change the first one to 70, and the second one to 80, this should give a fair bit of agility to the bot.
To get more control over our lifter we can set it to manual, you can do that via the weapon control dropdown menu, let's do that now.
Finally lets drive over to Bulldozer to give it a good flip.
Congratulations you are done, now you can take this knowledge you have learned and create your own custom builds, go fourth and let your creativity run wild.
6 Comments
Cody Furlong 19 Mar @ 10:31am 
Need a tutorial on how to do tracks please.
Okamifan1  [author] 6 Feb @ 9:21pm 
be sure when using the hole tool to leave plenty of space for wheels though so they dont clip and get cutoff.
Okamifan1  [author] 6 Feb @ 9:20pm 
Hi use the hole tool to make wheels under the chassis, this will come in a future guide I will start on once finished with my latest bot as well as a guide on spinning weapons. Cheers.
hauntingAghost 14 Jan @ 12:09pm 
Thanks for the guide! I'm wondering a few things though:

-how can I put the wheels under the chassis rather than on the side?
-how would I design a circular saw, with 360 rotation?
-can I add text and designs to my RC?

Thanks
Badwolf66 16 May, 2024 @ 7:29pm 
Thanks for the tutorial.
Okamifan1  [author] 12 Apr, 2024 @ 8:37pm 
Will probably do a more advanced one in the future.