Physics Based Aircraft Movement

[Lane]

Has anyone approached this subject yet?

I tried today to get into the physics actions and was pretty lost on how to create a decent character control system using physics based input and while it was pretty funny to watch and control my frankenship it was indeed a brief 30 minute test failure. I'm wanting to make a hover craft of sorts that flys around and picks up big boxes and drops them somewhere else.

Any suggestions? Joint setups? Any general tips would be a great help as I don't know anything about the physics system setup.

[artician]

You certainly picked a topic that gives you a healthy dose of learning and effort, and no effort is wasted because you definitely must have learned something, right? 

I've wanted to toy with physics-based controllers as well, but it can be super difficult to balance everything just right.  Since you're doing some sort of hovercraft type control, I'd suggest a ring of force-emitting objects that you then increase or decrease the amount of thrust on one side or another for movement. 

Would be cool to see what you come up with, but that's about all the help I can offer.

[Lane]

I tested it with two emitters earlier and it was pretty unpredictable. I'll try more when I get home. I'm wondering if I can combine it with some other non physics actions to kind of balance it out. Using the mouse to look around would be tricky.

[artician]

Yeah I would definitely recommend having a ring of 4-8 that simply stabilize the vehicle, and then maybe add some more on top of that for changing it's direction.

You could also try faking it, by giving it a mass or gravity of 0, and then change the gravity value itself to raise and lower the craft, while moving it's center of gravity to change direction.

You can't do much with a hybrid system.  It's not possible to combine kinematic and dynamic physics on a single object in Unity.  Things go crazy-broken.