I’m making a chainsaw that I’d like to import into the Torque engine. This basically means that all animation has to be done with bones, and th echainsaw has to be a single mesh object. (There can be as many armature objects as I like.)
What’s the best way to do this? I’ve tried numerous ways, and I think it’s my limited knowledge of Blender that’s preventing them from working.
EDIT: I managed to create an action/IPO with the motion I want for the tooth. So if I have several tooth meshes following several bone objects, it works like a dream. But I need the one chainsaw mesh to follow several bone bone objects, which to my knowledge isn’t possible. So I joined all the tooth meshes to the chainsaw, and joined all the bones into one armature. But now the whole armature follows the IPO as one object, which isn’t what I want. How do I get each bone to follow the path?
cant just follow a path, eh?
With bones, what I can think of is to have a bone for a tooth; animate the bone for one revolution, keying scale and rotation to match the guide bar outline. Then skin a tooth to the tip of the bone. but geez, then…a bone for each tooth/???
Well, if youre gonna have a bone for each tooth, just make a chain of bones, with a tooth for each bone, and animate them running around the guidebar.
Yeah, that’s what I’ll have to do. It’s going to be a pain to have to keyframe them all… 
if its for a game, why not just change the texture to a blur of teeth whipping around, like in Gears of War? the blood spurting out of the guy and the sound of the chainsaw is more than enough to convince me that the teeth are spinning.
No need to key them all, just key one bone then assign the same Pose IPO to each bone, make it single-user and offset it a bit. Something like that.
EDIT: Okay, well I tried that and it doesn’t work quite so easily 
But all is not lost, give me a moment.
It is possible to copy and paste all the curves from one bone to another (cumbersome, but possible). But it appears the current bone offsets remain, so while bone 1 turns around the radius of the chainsaw bar as expected, bone 2 turns a fraction earlier (incorrect Loc). I think it would be trivial to solve this but I don’t have time to think or experiment with right now.
EDIT: Actually, given that every tooth looks the same, you’d only need to key each bone for the distance travelled tot he next bone (sawtooth) since after that, it is visually repetitious. So rather than keying one bone travelling the full path, you’d only need to key each bone covering one small section of the whole path then set the IPOs to cyclic. A bit like a chaser-light effect.
Andy’s right (of course, how could I doubt an Apple guy); set up a chain of bones, and animate them moving one tooth forward. When animation repeats, they will jump back to position 1, but will look like the previous tooth now moved forward.