Heya all,
First up let me say that I’m new to Blender, but have several years of cad modeling exp. So newbie mistakes are on the cards :spin:
I’m struggling to work out what I’m missing when setting up an animation of this object (shown vertically exploded).
Basically each of the three segment rotate around the center of the lower mesh (at an angle), so that it starts as an almost straight cylinder and finishes up being bent into a u-shape.
I have it almost right - the 3 keyframes line up correctly, but I just cant seem to make the interpolation animation stick to the faces correctly.
There are three rotating bones and one helper bone for location (not necessary, just for clarity). They are parented to each other, so that takes care of the locations. Base bone rotates on its own, and middle and top bones copy base bone rotation with copy rotation constraint, but the middle bone rotation is inverted.
Each mesh piece is parented to their corresponding bones: armature in pose mode, select mesh piece, shift+select the bone, ctrl+P -> bone.
Best thing to do is to throw the CAD experience out the window when doing polygonal modeling. As you might already know, they are two different worlds for almost completely different purposes.
No thank you for making the starting post properly with paragraphs, images, and most importantly, the .blend file. It’s in the wrong category (animation & rigging would’ve been better one) but that is quite alright. These kinds of posts from new users are so rare around here that I wanted to check this and post an answer, and I don’t even do rigging
Thanks for the uber-quick response and kind words JA12, I really didn’t expect that. :o. Yes I think my CAD experience is actually a hinderence
What you have provided is almost complete, and your explanation was certainly easy to follow. I have even worked out how you slider works.
However, the rotation of each piece is a little bit complicated. It’s easiest if I provide a worked example I think:
If the base rotates, say 45 degrees c/w, the middle will be rotated 90 c-c/w and the top will rotate 90 c/w.
This gives the rotational ratios of 1:-2:2, for base:middle:top
The net result is that the top face of the ‘top’ mesh (egad! is that clear?) is bent around a single axis, in this instance the Y-axis. After I get this bit nailed the next step is to add a simple rotation or the base, without altering the rotation of the middle and top meshes.
I’ve found the influence slider, is this the right track for altering the ratios? Or should I look at making a clone of the top bone and do some re-parenting first? I’d like to be able to replicate the results for myself.
