Is there a addon that would help me animate pulleys and gears or tanktreads?
I want to animate gears on top of one another rotating clockwise,counterclockwise,clockwise,counterclockwise etc.WIth some of the gears with pulleys and some not.The pulleys are big at one end and small at the other.It is a idea for a device i was thinking of.
I believe it is very advanced.
What more complex than this?
This clock mechanism is all rigged and works exactly as the clock does, including all the chime mechanisms 
Let me know if you would like to know how I did it!
Cheers, Clock.
Attachments
It what my device would do that makes it advanced.You may think I am crazy.But my device would make all spaces accessible from one
space.Meaning there are no volumes but there are volumes.
Heya clock, nice clock! :eyebrowlift:
Um, yea, those statements don’t make sense, care to enlighten us?
Anyhow, I hope this makes sense. Once you learn how to set up drivers, which is pretty much a common skill amongst blender riggers/animators, it’s not that hard to do. Stepping back and taking a look at what it would take to write an addon to animate gears, by applying drivers to them, seems like a lot of work. It could be done, but it just seems like an awful lot of work to write the code to do something so easy.
I am well aware of having to deal with a large number of parts and how tedious the repetitive work can get for simple tasks like this. In the past, I’ve written tools to automate tedious, repetitive tasks, and spent more time writing the tool code than it would have taken me to just do the job. In my case, I had a model that was over 200 objects on the left side and I wanted to duplicate those objects, flip them over to the right side, then I had to rename them. Took me 3x as long to write a script to rename those objects for me than for me to just buckle down and rename them manually. Once the simple script worked, the code grew 4x in size to add in error checking and a UI, so it would be user friendly by all.
I think I posted that addon here in the released scripts/addons section of the forum, and I don’t think it’s been really used by many users.
You might want to do a search of the released scripts/addons section and see, maybe someone has written such a tool and published it.
Just my thoughts,
Randy
The machine does what a wormhole does.It is the mechanical equivalent of a wormhole.Which would probably prove
there existence.
Latter when i fininish a animated prototype of the machine in blender.You could take a look at it for yourself.
Then it would be explained a lot better.
Yep, you have completely lost me! But then I am getting old, though I still know how to rig gear trains…
Cheers, Clock.
On the example of the machines motion in this blend.The disks represent gears powered by motors.
Each one four gears from bottom to the top on the lower gear has a pulley around it.which is larger on one end than the other.
what i would like for the machine to do is align one end of each of those four pulleys with the same speed that is on the top fith gear.Which is out from it’s center.
Attachments
machine.blend (502 KB)
Hey
This seems interesting and is there any plugin which allows to really create better gears in blender?
I mean a serious one like simple, complex gears, external and internal gears ?
Regards
Just use drivers to set the rotation of each disk ?
All the gears in this project were made with the standard Blender “Gears” add-on, including the internal toothed gears in the epicyclic gear trains. It’s all rigged with standard drivers for gear rotations and bones to move gears around like in the rear differential set. This mechanism mimics reality, so every gear change results in a different speed for the back wheels and the diff varies the back wheel individual speeds as you turn the steering wheel, simulating going around a corner.
Cheers, Clock.