I am trying to make a robotic arm type attachment for a mars rover game I may make and I run into problems using the hinges and motors. Essentially, I want 360 degrees of freedom similar to the way a claw or crane would work. I use the hinges for this to work so I can apply motors to move it. I am having trouble with adding rigid bodies to nodes and all. I’m just curious if this is the best way to do this and if so, how should I go about doing it? If there is another better way, I greatly appreciate suggestions.
If i was doing this project i would model the rover in blender and make the parts that have to rotate 360 degrees separate meshes so it can rotate freely. Then rig all the moving parts to an armature(skeleton) and then rotate and manipulate the bones of the model directly through code ;D sounds simpler to me anyway.
I’m not quite sure what you are trying to do, more detail may help people help you.
Are you looking for an inverse kinematics solution (i.e. tell system hand goes at X and it positions all the motors?)
SixDofJoints have motors and, as the name suggests, 6 degrees of freedom 
@zarch, essential I want to a robotic arm movement like one you would see on a exploring submarine to pick up samples. I want pivots on the arm I can activate with motors to pick up rocks with a claw at the bottom of the arm.
@vvishmaster, if I could find a 3d rover model to download, would I be able to add a skeleton to it? If so, how do I add a skeleton. I have never really used blender before. I usually try to export obj files for jme3 but the textures usually never show up.
Blender is pretty simple to create and rig simple models.
Your best bet is to try and google that, there is a lot of info out there.
From your status of failure I’d suggest reading our manual first before you dip into google.
@normen, I also have a question regarding the frame rate often project. I don’t know if it is an issue with the engine itself or something else. All I have is a medium poly vehicle on a terrain without textures, and the shadow rendering is off, and for some reason it’s averaging around 15 fps. Even on a Mac book pro. I curious if there is a resolution setting or some way I can increase the frame rate to make the project more enjoyable.
@norman, your point being?
@jrlowe said: @norman, your point being?
That you’ve provided lots of information but not the information we’d need to diagnose the problem.
For example, I have a model loaded under the same circumstances and I get 1500 FPS. So maybe you don’t really have a problem.
…except you do.
@pspeed, @normen, sorry about the frame rate issue, turned out to be that my wheels had an insane amount of polygons so I got rid of them now im running at 115 FPS so all is well. I guess I will play around with blender and adding the armature skeleton to a rover model to get the parts. And i’m assuming there is a way to move these bone joints in jme3?