I know there are tons of threads, tutorials, videos on making chains and tank tracks, but I can’t find a working solution so I feel I need to ask for help. Also, sorry in advance for all the reading.
Im modeling and rigging a large industrial popsicle freezer, the main feature is a long chain of popsicle molds attached to a chain link. Its a very simple path, straight then turns upside-down around a large sprocket. My problem is the shear scale of it all. There are about a 1000 molds making this chain and the scale of the entire machine is in the hundreds of units.
Most solutions I find involve creating either a motion path for each link, or create a cv at each link and attach the link to the cv. This would take way way too long with 1000 links. I also tried using a wire deformer, which would be perfect if the dropoff distance would go higher than 20, more like 50 or 100.
The closest I got was with a script I found on creativecrash:
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/animation/c/create-chain
Which worked beautifully, its exactly what I need…but it doesn’t animate well. When I adjust the offset to animate the chain, it A: uses an arbitrary number as its max like 6.58 or 8, and B: if you key it over some frames, it doesn’t transition smoothly. It starts off fine but then suddenly snaps ahead to a higher value. The creator doesn’t seem to be active on createcrash any more so I cant ask him.
I feel like the solution is somewhere in either editing that script, but im not sure where, or finding out how the offset attribute controls the movement and see if theres some weird curve being applied. I’ve only started learning scripting so I couldn’t see any clues in the script, and I can’t seem to find any connections to the offset attribute
If anyone has an idea of how to rig this chain I would greatly appreciate it.
