Viewing animation

Support Basics & Interface
1

OK, I am sure this is a stupid question, but of course I am going to ask it anyway! :smiley:

I am in pose mode, went through the process of moving and setting LOC. But when I press Alt-A, all I get is a little red square with changing numbers. How do I actually see my animation?

Thanks!

2

Works fine for me… in pose mode

Blender 225, Windows 2000,

  1. Are you sure you have an animation… Different postions\rotations at different frames? (Can you see it when you use the arrow keys to change frames?

  2. Do you have the cursor in the window you want to view animated when you press Alt + A?

  3. Are you in the correct frame range? If your animation goes from frames 1 to 30 and you press Alt + A at frame 31, you won’t see anything animated.

3

That was it! I didn’t have any positions, well there was one, but it was so small that I didn’t even see it untill using the arrow keys.

While on this, how do you delete positions?

Thanks!!

4

For objects, you would use the IPO window, for armatures, you can use the actions window. With your armature selected, open an actions window, (It looks like a little person figure on the button in the blender windows popup menu)

You should see yellow keyframe markers for all your keys beside the name of the bones you have keyed… You can move them, delete them , copy them etc…

5

One more question along these lines, what I am animating is a backhoe, using an armature for the boom. How do I get it to pick up the tractor, for instance if the boom is pushing on the ground, how do I get it to lift the back of the tractor?

6

This is a good question… Because if the arm is attached to the tractor, the arm will move when the tractor is lifted. I think the best way to do this is to build an armature with an two IK constraints, One in the middle and one at the end.

Try these rigs… move the control bone in the middle Bone.006 on the top rig, .007 on the lower rig, Bone.006 on the lower rig is at the tip of the bucket arm and controls the bucket arm.

http://home.att.net/~holywordkids/IKrig.blend

Build your arm sections and use Bone Parenting to attach them to the rig. It is also possible to build convincing hydraulics with armatures or objects targeted at each other.