Airplane Landing Gear IK Setup

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi there. Im newish to blender and dont know that much about IK rigging and stuff like that. Im working on a project of an airplane that takes off and then crashes a short time later. I am trying to get this to look as realistic as possible. Is there a way to use IK to get all of the landing gear to go up at the same time and have the doors on the gear bays close at the same time using only one controller? Kind of like how the gear goes in on a boeing 747 in flight simulator x. All of your help will be greatly appreciated

2

You wouldn’t want to use IK on something like this, you should look up the ‘action constraint’ for this. Basically, what you do is create an action of the landing gear retracting and the doors closing and create a master control bone. Once the constraint is added to all the bones that move and set up properly, moving the once control bone will animate all the bones the constraint is on.

At this time I do not have a good example to show you how to set it up, but if you can’t figure it out, post back here, and I’ll work up an example for you.

Randy

3

Randy

Thanks. Ill try that, but ive never used ‘Action constraints’ before.

Thanks for the tip though. Ill try to learn it myself but the help would be greatly appreciated

4

You can even use constrains without bones (using objects instead) - like in this example

5

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Constraints/Relationship/Action
That both tells you what it does and gives a short tutorial on the bottom for you to learn the basics. I’ve now learned of action constraints as of half an hour ago just from that although it took several tries to get it to work right.

6

Actually, now that I think about it a bit more, you really wouldn’t want to use the action constraint in your particular case. When I suggested that idea, I was thinking about an asset that would be used over and over again in an animation, like an airplane that takes off, lands, takes off again, etc. If the airplane takes off only once, and then crashes, the landing gear would retract only once. So my idea would require more time to set up than just hand animating the gear retracting once.

Witold Jaworski is right about constraints working with objects and not needing bones. However, I’d still use bones for this and just hand animate them. My reasoning is this, let’s say you have 2 bones for 1 landing gear door, one for the left door, one for the right door. Once you keyframe the left door bone closing, you could use the copy pose & paste flip pose functions to copy the keyframes, one at a time to the right door. You could copy the keyframes of one left door closing, then paste it to 3 left doors closing, then copy the mirrored pose to 3 right doors, ensuring all doors close at the same time.

Randy