#Best way to build an excavator with articulating arms?

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indigo glen
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I have been working on creating a semi-stylized excavator that can be used to interact with physics. The main issues I am having is understanding how to keep the physics of the arms while moving them around.

I have tried three different approaches, but haven't found one that really quite fits:

  1. VehicleBody3D, but getting the arms to move exactly how I want as hinge-jointed rigid bodies was troublesome and often buggy.
  2. CharacterBody3D worked for a little bit, but I am not sure how to setup the articulating arms to maintain collision in the parent character body while at the same time being parented so their transforms are carried down the node tree. I tried remote transforms, but since they move the targets to the center of the nodes, that didn't work for the articulated arm movements.
  3. Skeletons. I really don't know enough about them right now and am just digging into this setup. Worried the physics connection to skeletons when they're meant more for animation might be difficult to learn.

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated. I have about a year and a half of learning in 2D. The transition to 3D is taking some time.

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indigo glen
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Throwing this in here for reference. The CharacterBody3D of the truck will collide with the CSG box, but the base arm will not. Right now it is CB3D(truck)>CB3D(arm). Since they do not keep collision in children CB3D, I can't keep the high level control of the arm while still having collision that stops the parent.

indigo glen
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I think I figured out how to properly nest the Transform3D nodes to make this work.

The setup is using the arms as Area3D (though it could probably be about anything) and nesting the Transform3D nodes where the center of the collision of those Area3D are.

The Transform3D nodes then target additional CollisionShape3D on the base CharacterBody3D and transform them with the Area3D movement.