Hi all,
I was reading a post asking how to rig a crankshaft & piston, so I threw together a quick mesh & armature. Since I haven’t made any tutorials recently, I decided to record this one. The video can be found here:
I’ve attached the source file to this post. If anyone has any questions, please post them to this thread. Please note, this is a blender 2.5a2 file, but should work just fine in 2.49b as well.
Enjoy
Randy
Crank1.blend (75.1 KB)
Great tutorial, only a couple things I noticed. First, I would change the animation to end on frame 40 instead of frame 41, since 41 is a copy of frame 1. Lastly, I would change the handle types to vector since the piston should have a continuous motion instead of it slowing down and speeding up. I attached a new blend with the mentioned changes.
Crank1edit.blend (77 KB)
Hey natew, thanks for your input! In the last few minutes of the video, as the animation was rendering, I covered that topic of why the animation wasn’t smooth. My suggestions were to change the f-curves type to linear, instead of bezier, and also that I should have ended the animation at frame 40, not 41.
The aim of the tutorial was rigging mechanical objects with armatures, not animation. I could’ve very well covered those topics in a few minutes, but it wasn’t my focus.
Personally, I really like some of blendercookie.com tutorials, but some of them tend to be a bit long… I wanted to keep this video short and to the point, but still be beginner friendly…
Thanks for the interest,
Randy
Okay, sorry about that. I watched the video without sound so I was unaware that you mentioned that.
No problemo natew… :rolleyes: