Piston/Pump Action!

Support Animation and Rigging
1

So I have all these tiles on pistons.

Capture2.PNG1048×722 21.1 KB

I have joined all the separate meshes together so they count as one.
For what I need to accomplish all these tiles needed to be combined together into
one skeletal mesh.

Capture.PNG930×687 7.17 KB

So as you can see above they are all parented together and it is rigged like a character being a skeletal mesh.

My goal was to make the piston push the tile up, make the whole piston+tile single mesh rotate 90 degrees and then lower itself down.

3.PNG611×720 3.89 KB

I need ideas in how I can accomplish this . I have looked around and haven’t found a solution that involves just a simple stretch of the top bone (see image above). I tried scaling it but it just enlarges the tile.

Any solution or ideas are much appreciated cheers! :slight_smile:

2

This probably isn’t what you are looking for but I was thinking about this problem and came up with this. If I understand you correctly, you want the piston to raise the platform, rotate 90° on the z axis and then drop back into place. You could set it up in animation with a rig similar to this.

piston.jpg1600×900 191 KB


the 4th bone in the rig has an IK set to it, just pull it straight up on the z axis. The first bone controls the position of the rig and can be rotated the way you want then just drop the IK bone back into position and your animation is done. I hope that helps

3

Do you want all the Tiles to do this at the same time? Or individually perform the motions at various times?

4

Hey cheers for the replies.
I would like it to be separate timing for each tile.

5

Sorry to have not gotten back on this… I have been snowed under with work… this is an interesting project however and I hope to get to it at some point… have you made any progress yourself on this?