Vehicle animation

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

I’ve tried to make a Vehicel animation of this thing here

4rad_01.jpg1588×2300 201 KB

Imagine the tires can only spin forward and the man is standing on two chains. When he leans on the left side he pushes the chain down and the tires come closer to each other. The front wheel cant moove backwards so the back wheel has to move forward. The same thing on the other side makes it able to move.
Now I want to make such an animation in Blender but I don’t know how:( So I made a simple scene and tried to animate the front an back axis but now I dont know how to create the middle axis so that its fixed in the middle of the axis and moves around with them. I also want to animate the tires and the chains. Maybe this schould be done with constraints? I dont know how to use constrains but do I even have to make this with constraints?
Here my .blend file
vehicletest.blend (449 KB)

Thanks

#2

I f I understand you correctly, you are saying that the wheels cannot rotate backwards, so they are on ratchets. When you push down on one side, the front wheel of the opposite side must come forwards as the wheels do not allow backwards motion. Am I correct so far? This causes a sort of wobbling motion, effecting forward motion.

So as I see it, you should do this with IK Constraints to get the basic motion working first, then worry about the wheels not rotating backwards and hence achieve your forward motion. If what I have said makes any sense, let me know and we can progress from there.

It would be easy for me to rig this for you, but you will learn nothing, so if you don’t mind, we can take this bit at a time so you do.

Cheers, Clock.

#3

Thanks for taking time to my Project I really appreciate that!

Yes your absolutely right thats how it should work.
Ok I already thought it would be very easy but i’m completely new to animation and rigging and want to learn this now.

So first I really don’t know how to begin. Maybe you have a tip for a tutorial or something for covering up the basics of constraints and rigging or how did you learned it?
So what do you think how schould I start? Am I on the richt way and is my animation ok or so far is it just trash?:confused:
Anyways, after watching a tutorial about rigging, I started new amd rigged the vehicle and parented it to the mesh. But now I dont now how to go on…again.
Heres the .blend file vehicletest1.blend (478 KB)
And just to make things clear I’m doing this Project just for personal purposes;)

#4

You can start off looking at the tutorials on my website, there are two airplane ones that should help you understand how IK constraints and mechanical systems work. I am busy all day today, but can look again at your file this evening/tomorrow.

http://www.lafavinie.f2s.com/blender/index.html

Or you can take a look on www.cgcookie.com under the Blender tutorials.

Cheers, Clock.

#5

OK I have looked at the drawing and built a simple Inverse Kinematics (IK) based rig for it. The first thing to say is that it would never work, harsh I know but, there it is. The reasons are as below:

There is a differential in the amount of steer that is achieved at the end of the range of movement of the treads, i.e. they impart more turn the further they are away from a horizontal attitude. I started them off at 25 degrees and allowed them to rotate + and - 25. This would cause the axles to bend as the movements are not equal.

The way it is designed, you can achieve only very slight movement of the axle for 50 degrees movement of the tread arms, so it could never provide propulsion, only steering and then not much of that either. I measured 3.65 degrees of rotation of the axle, giving it a large turning radius (5.8 / sin(3.65) = 91 units, or approx. 7.7 times the length of the vehicle).

So here is the blend file with my armature in it, just rotate the bone “tread-1” about its X axis (key R X X and then move the mouse) and you will see how it works and how little movement you get. So I think a fundamental redesign is called for!

Sorry about that…:wink:

Let me know where you want to go from here.

Cheers, Clock.

vehicletest.blend (692 KB)

PS. I have packed your image as a reference file in the view it will only show in regular orthographic views such and Top (key 7), etc.

#6

Thank you very much, on the one hand your blend-file is absolutely helpful for me to understand, how rigging and IK function within blender. On the other hand you also verified, that this concept will barely work in real life. That was exactly, what I tried to figure out