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TwinsenDude
03-28-2009, 07:27 PM
Hi. I'm having a problem where I want to rig a mechanical character. All the joints are done with U-Joints, which look somewhat like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Universal_joint.png

I found that image off of google images, but it should get the point across. The problem that I'm having is that the middle piece you see separated in the first image needs to move in different axes based on different sides of the u-joint.

So basically I need the middle piece to rotate in the X and Y direction based on the main controller at that joint, but the Z rotation needs to be governed by a different controller, the one higher up in the heirarchy.

So I tried doing orient constraints only using X and Y, and only using Z, but the problem with this is that when I created a constraint not using all three axes and tried rotating the controller, the mesh would follow for 180 degrees of rotation and then flip and rotate in the opposite (wrong) direction for the other 180 degrees.

Does anyone know how to properly rig this kind of situation?

Thanks
Remi
03-29-2009, 11:38 PM
to me it looks like the middle piece only has one axis of rotation, actually, they all look like they have one axis. Not too difficult to set up unless i'm not understanding you correctly.
TwinsenDude
04-01-2009, 01:44 PM
No no, that image is just a reference I found on google images of what a U-Joint is...

Pay attentino to the four cylinders sticking out of the middle piece... these make up two axes, and for the U-Joint (stands for universal) to really be universal it needs to be able to rotate in either of these directions independently
Remi
04-01-2009, 02:28 PM
Ok, well in that example, it only would rotate on one axis. I understand what a U-joint is. Perhaps a better example?
uiron
04-07-2009, 12:16 PM
rigging universal joint is really easy, that's just no more than two aim constraints, just gotta select right up vectors.
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