A question about parenting armatures

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hello again

im a relative newcomer and i was wondering something

i am currently modeling an airplane and i set up armatures and vertex parenting so that the wings could swing backward. were i to add missles to the underside of the wing, how could i make it so that the missiles always remained parralel to the body of the wing?

ive been able to use a seperate armature parented to each missile but it takes a long time to rotate each missle (through the armature) to be parralel to the body.

any suggestions?

2

Add a copy rotation constraint to each missile “bone” and point it to the body “bone”.

Martin

3

thanks theeth…

i got it to do partially what i wanted it to do…

(as you can see im really quite new to blenders…)

but now the missile is facing in the wrong direction…

how do i solve this problem?

~DBH

4

You could put a bone in the body, use that as the target for the copy restraint and then rotate it around until the missiles point the way you like.

5

hmmmmm… ive tried to set up a target for this… as well as setting up targets for any other constraint (such as for an IK solver,) but for some reason, as soon as i click out of the box, the name of the bone i typed in the “target” box disappears…

i hope someone can help me out on this…

6

Did you make sure you typed the name of the armature in the object box and the name of the bone in the box that pops up underneath? You don’t actually need a bone for the target, you can just put, say, a cube somewhere, gives the missile bones a copy rotation constraint and have the cube as the target, so then rotating the cube will allow you to point them the way you want. You could always then just move the cube inside the mesh of the plane so it is hidden and keep it as a control object for later.