creyc
05-04-2005, 02:00 AM
I've been working on this simple part for way too long without much success to show for myself. Going in I thought no problem, use a bone here, bone there and fix all the parts onto them and it's all good.
I've spent enough time working with bones but for some reason I've never actually tried limiting a bones position completely to one axis, that is to say the Y axis. I need a way to constrain the tip of a bone so that the connected piston will only "slide" up and down in the sleeve and not jostle around from side to side. Is there an easy way to do this in Cinema R9?
I also tried my hand at solving this with the OHM mechanics plugins, which are an awesome set of free plugins if you don't have them but unfortunately don't have the ability to link part-to-part the accurate way bones do.
http://creyc.no-ip.com/images/pistons/correct.jpg
You can see in this picture the shape of the model, with the lowest bone representing the crank (mesh not visible), the next representing the connecting rod and finally the small bone for the piston itself. This is my problem bone as it should always stay in it's current X-Z position, only moving along the Y axis up and down as the lower bones affect it.
I've spent enough time working with bones but for some reason I've never actually tried limiting a bones position completely to one axis, that is to say the Y axis. I need a way to constrain the tip of a bone so that the connected piston will only "slide" up and down in the sleeve and not jostle around from side to side. Is there an easy way to do this in Cinema R9?
I also tried my hand at solving this with the OHM mechanics plugins, which are an awesome set of free plugins if you don't have them but unfortunately don't have the ability to link part-to-part the accurate way bones do.
http://creyc.no-ip.com/images/pistons/correct.jpg
You can see in this picture the shape of the model, with the lowest bone representing the crank (mesh not visible), the next representing the connecting rod and finally the small bone for the piston itself. This is my problem bone as it should always stay in it's current X-Z position, only moving along the Y axis up and down as the lower bones affect it.