so here’s a likely simple question that I’m just thinking about incorrectly and thus lost on.
I have some gears and crankshafts I’m trying to rig up.
I have a planetary gear (blue) with a crankshaft that needs to drive another crankshaft (red) centered on the planetary gears orbit.
I have everything up to the final pivot between the purple arm and the red crankshaft junction working easily.
my efforts with “track to” containing seem misguided from the start as I had the empty you see there being the target of both the red and purple, which completely ignored the location of the empty and thus it didn’t move.
I’ve now tried a “clamp to” with the circular path but that is causing all sorts of weird behavior. but it still suffers from the empty object in question not remaining stationary in relation to the purple arm, to spectacular result. The image here has all three points relatively close together, but they don’t stay that way with even the slightest input. and I’m starting to think the “clamp to” constraint was also misguided.
so really I’m asking here because I need help to rethink how to go about this. Ideas on what basic bit of logic I’m failing at here?
Post the blend file please, I need to see where things are centred and what motions are expected. Looks like a job for an Armature, but not sure without the file. It looks like blue gear is imparting a reciprocal motion on the red crank? The purple link looks offset to the blue gear. I am assuming the grey gear stays still here.
If the motion is incorrect, just let me know where and I will change things, I am still not sure where things pivot, or link from your post. Just press Play to see it all working. The driver needs you to check “Autorun Python Scripts” in Users Prefs => File Tab as it’s an Expression driver - this just rotates the main bone one degree per frame, starting at 0 on frame 1.
Formula for the driver expression is (frame - 1) * (pi / 180) and there are no variables.
