Rigging a chain to follow swing arm suspension



Hi Guys

I have been trying to solve this issue for weeks now with no luck and I’ve really run out of options.
The main goal here is to have a chain to follow the ‘Chain Path’ in the images and circulate around it to simulate a wheel and sprocket also moving. I have all the hard modelling done but I’m struggling to rig it properly. I am convinced the swing arm and suspension have been rigged to move Ok.

I would like to get the sprocket bone to spin and in turn have the chain run around the path and the wheel turn all at once.

Does anyone have any good ways of solving that? I can provide more images if needed.

Thanks in advance.
Phil

Hey, look for tutorials on rigging ‘Tank tracks’, this is similar to that. As far as the chain swing axis, you could parent it to a new bone(chain bone) that pivots at the “pivot point” you show and copies the rotation of the swing arm bone, parent ‘chain bone’ to your ‘main bone’ (small one at bottom of your pic). Your gear meshes will have to be modeled mathematically correct (ratio) if your going to show teeth engagement in to chain with rotation.

Thanks. Great info. It helped solve the issues I was having.
One of the big ones was getting the chainlinks to follow the path as it moved up and down. Managed to do this by constraining the chain links to the path using a ‘Child Of’ constraint. Previous attemps at parenting the links to the path didn’t work but ‘Child Of’ did.

Cheers ajcdfin