Need some tips on rigging a cuckoo clock

#1

Hey guys, I’m working on a cuckoo bird clock and I’m pretty stuck at the spring part.
I’ve tried using constraints, like… aim constraint and driven key to control one part of the spring, and it worked. but putting a few together becomes a headache. I’m pretty sure some of my groupings are a bit messy and has caused some loss in terms of freedom in rigging it, but I know there are better ways rather than putting joints, and i know there’s gonna be some expression need to be written in the attributes.
Does anyone know any similar tutorial so i could study and understand the workflow better?

one part of the spring =
/
\ /

if you guys need a sample file i could upload later.

any comments and tips and guide or any whatsoever is much appreciated!!

regards,
from a guy who wanna learn

#2

Hi,
I took some time to put together a solution. You’ll find it as an attachment In case that’s what you had in mind, I can explain to you how I did it. It’s based on an expression and just a few constraints to help it.

Cheers,
JacopoS

#3

ouch, i’m using maya 2014, and I can’t open your file =/
which version of maya you’re using?

#4

I’m using Maya 2016 but since I saved an ASCII file, you can simply open it in any text editor and change the version for retro-compatibility. It’s quite easy:

  1. open the file using a text editor such as WordPad
  2. in the first 10 lines of text, you’ll see the “2016” word appearing a few times: simply change that into 2014.
  3. save the file, close the text editor and try to open the file in Maya.

This is an old-school Maya trick that everybody use for reading files on an outdated Maya version. Let me know if you are having troubles making it work.
Cheers!