looking for tutorials how to animate a crane

[Soth]

Hi,
I need to do animation of something like that before Monday morning and to be honest have no idea where to start (need to rig it somehow).



I am so nervous, pls help!

[melmoth2]

Originally Posted by Soth

Hi,
I need to do animation of something like that before Monday morning and to be honest have no idea where to start (need to rig it somehow).

What is it supposed to do in the animation?

[Soth]

Rotate, slide, pick up things and this sort of stuff. What I will have proble is hydrulic arms. Those are linked to two models and I will like them to just slide out and in when I move whole crane around.

[Otterman]

You might wanna have a dig around some of my posts-i do alot of this kinda thing...theres some simple rigs here that might give you some pointers

http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=101464

http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=79486

[daforum]

Have a look at these links:

http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthr...hlight=Pistons

ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movi..._PistonRig.mov

http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthr...hlight=Pistons

They will hopefully give you ideas how to do what you need to do.

[jeric_synergy]

Originally Posted by Soth

Rotate, slide, pick up things and this sort of stuff. What I will have proble is hydrulic arms. Those are linked to two models and I will like them to just slide out and in when I move whole crane around.

I did a crane very similar to that one once (hmmm, maybe I should sell it to you) , IIRC, I did the pistons with IK, pretty easy. Possibly just targeting would work too.

Getting the telescoping sections to work was tougher, and required Expressions. Basically, each subsequent section went out a percentage of its parent's extension. (I have no idea if that's how a real crane works, but it looked good.)

Parenting the HOOK to the end of the crane is fun too, since it never tilts-- it's HANGING. So you can't just parent it. I used Channel Follower, and erased the top of the "cables" using a clip map.

Oh yeah, good times. You'll have fun!

EDIT: I may have used Relativity for some of the things. Also, you can make your life easier if you set up the jacks to follow each other: then you only have to animate one jack and the other 3 deploy automatically.

[shrox]

I think it looks like it would be fun. I like to animate machines.

[JeffrySG]

A bunch of good links here too:
http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=97659

[MUCUS]

Why not just put a morph on the hydraulic pyston which will be driven by the pitch rotation of the crane? It should be really easy to control with cycler without any expressions I think.

[jeric_synergy]

And remember we have POSITION IK now, maybe some use can be made of that.