Animatings piston and cylinders

[Airone]

Hi folks,

 

I am experiencing problems with my landing gear, especially piston and cylinder.

 

I have used "look at constraint" for both cylinders and piston looking at each other. It is working pretty well in 3dsmax BUT not in the lom file, where all my cylinders (and pistons) are frezzed!!!

 

Some of you recommend to use only position and rotation argument, but how keep my piston and cylinder aligned all along the gear carriage movement by proceeding "manually" for setting the keys?

 

Thanks for helping or clues,

 

Airone

[coyote101]

It took me a lot of trial and error. This is how I did it. I used only rotation and movement. figure out the best way to attach parts and which parts will only look attached. Example, my front gear is not actually attached to the cylinder. The piston is attached to the cylinder. The cylinder is attached to the door. The door is rotated and the piston/cylinder move with it. Then do a separate event, Aas you move the slider a little at a time, the gear/door rotates and you can position the piston where you want it.

I think you can do both a rotation and a movement in the same argument, but you can not have two rotations or two movements. You can have two with the same number but you need to have a different name.

 

Event 1 Arg 0 Gear rotating up/down (rotate)

Event 2 Arg 0 Door opening (rotate)

Event 3 Arg 0 Piston moving (movement)

[RedBeard2]

I'm currently trying to use a dummy on each end of the shock absorber and using LookAt constraints for the dummy and aligning the arg based controlled shock to the dummy to bake the keys. It only kind of works at the moment as any time you use need to check the flip check box, any alignment updates cause terrible side effects.

 

I'm still looking for a better way.