I purchased a model of a diesel locomotive and loaded it into my scene. I want to animate the windshield wipers but one of the wipers is just floating in space with an odd local and world orientation. (The artist apparently just left it hanging there. π) The wiper's origin is back at the rear of the locomotive, as is the origin of every other one of the model's components.
Tasks required:
1. Move the origin to the base of the wiper arm. (Complete)
2. Attach the wiper to the appropriate face on the locomotive body that corresponds to where the wiper would be in the real world. (Complete)
3. Align the local z-axis of the wiper with the normal of the body face so that the wiper can be rotated around that axis to make it behave like a real wiper. (Done so far by eyeballing it. Would snapping help in this case? How to?)
4. Parent the wiper to an empty so the empty acts as a controller. (Necessary? Desired?)
5. Figure out how to set up the world orientation and transforms so that when animated, the wiper rotates around its local z-axis and not the world z-axis. Currently, the wiper rotates into/out of the body no matter which axis I rotate around. (Confused)
Thanks! Please direct me to a better place to post if here isn't appropriate!
Quick proof of concept.
No armatures, 2 empties as controllers, no parenting/constraints only. But no animation in the geometry. Tram motion from a camera move.
Thank you, everyone, for all the good information. I've learned a lot! π¨π»βπ
After doing some rigging work on a space station with Dwayne, I'm revisiting this tram thing (a year later) to get some practice with my new rigging skills.
The armature's Root bone is represented by a wireframe box around the whole mesh, and the entire mesh is parented to it.
The MECH bones are aligned with each wiper's motor spindle. I moved the origin of each wiper object to the center of its spindle and aligned its Z-axis with the normal of the body face to which it's attached. The end result is that rotating the MECH bone around its Y-axis will rotate the wiper around its spindle's Z-axis.
Getting the geometry in place and aligned correctly was the hardest part of this exercise. It only took about 30 minutes to do the rig and work out the driver logic.
I think this is a much simpler and much better rig than what I did last time. Then, I didn't use an armature. Instead I used empties and constraints and Euler order changes.
Rig:
Drivers & Constraints:
Animation:
That looks great. Be careful you might get addicted to rigging. Especially if you like puzzles.Β