What do you do for engine nozzle animation?

I searched the forums for techniques for engine nozzle animation and I've seen some people are animating each individual vane and others have tried to using scaling, but didn't get it to work.

I'm seeing similar issues and wondering if there's a good and simple way to do this. Does anyone want to describe their favorite technique?

Sorry I didnt get a guide done last night, fighting a flu, and stuff....

I didnt want to have to custom animate each feather, so I tried so stuff

For the Current Animation, I Used Bones,

Place One Bone In the Exhaust, and the 2nd link just outside the exhaust, Link the Nozzle to the bones.

Use the 2nd Link, and Scale Up and down, if it scales weirdly, un link the nozzle from the bones and adjust position in or out of the engine more.

I think my 2nd link on my bones is outside of the nozzle.

Also, When using bones, you have to put a bounding box around the aircraft.

Will put up some images tonight If I can get onto my PC.

Also, I Can use the Bones setup, and rotate the 2nd link, to make my nozzle move/rotate like a thrust vectoring nozzle, for what it’s worth

I searched the forums for techniques for engine nozzle animation and I've seen some people are animating each individual vane and others have tried to using scaling, but didn't get it to work.

 

I'm seeing similar issues and wondering if there's a good and simple way to do this. Does anyone want to describe their favorite technique?

There are several ways of going about this depending on how sophisticated you want it, but the simplest way is to make several nozzles at varies stages of retraction(and glow intensity in the texture) and then use arg. based visibility to hide/unhide them according to the value steps under the appropriate argument number.

Doing it this way the transition is not as smooth as can be achieved with other methods, but its fairly straight forward and it works.

Personally I think I would use a single nozzle base, divide each "feather" into two or three sections, linking the most rear to the middle one and this to the first - then animate(arg. based rotation) in steps in order to get a smoother transition and a slight curvature of the feathers as they retract.

This is the guide I used to learn bones.

Basically, I Save the Scene as a Separate scene (to experiment with).

Setup the bones, center them,

Select the Exhaust Nozzle, Choose the Skin Modifier, then select the Bones.

Select the second bone, and scale with arg scaling controller.

I also Have the Nozzle moving back using the Position Arg Controller.

ALso, the Aircraft bust be surrounded by a Bounding Box for Bone Animations to work.

So:

This is the guide I used to learn bones.

 

..made by a Welshman from the sound of it :D

The bones method seems to work reasonably well once I figured out how to position everything.

However, the bounding box remains a bit of a mystery to me. I can create a dummy object with TYPE = "bounding_box"; but it is completely square, with quite a bit of open space above and below the aircraft. I tried using a regular box to get a closer fit to the aircraft, but the exporter didn't like that. Is there something else I should try?

Never mind. I forgot about using scaling to change the size of the box.

Skate, you gave me a great idea for hydraulic lines used on retracting landing gear. Cheers!