vehicle rigging

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hello!

I’ve been using blender for a fair while now, but I’m just getting to grips with rigged animation.

I basically have a vehicle that I’m animating on a path - and I’ve successfully got the wheels spinning according to the stride path tutorial on the wiki.

My next question is how to go about animating the steering assemblies according to the vehicle’s position on the path?

I’m sure there must be a way to make a bone to something track the tangent of the path - but I’ve no idea where to start…

Any help will be much appreciated. Cheers,

Doug.

2

Have you seen this?

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=85166

3

no i haven’t seen that.

i’ll have a good read and post back if i still have questions.

thanks!

4

Thanks for the link given above - partly because of reading that, and partly through getting stuck in and trying things out i’ve managed to achieve what i wanted.

http://ftlfm.com/doug/lego_truck_rig.gif (630kb animated gif)

I didn’t use the whole procedure as described - for the wheel rotation i’ve used an armature + actions + stride path setting. the steering rig is very similar though.