Animation advice needed.

[Tommy L]

I have a mechanical setup that needs animating. I am new to animating anything thats not a camera or a particles, so these questions may seem rather basic, but there will porobably be more to follow.:

 

1: I need to animate a telescopic arm, for descriptions sake, lets just say its a telescope. I need to be able to 'pull' one end and the other pieces follow in order. It woulkd be nice if there was a small 'rebound' on each new piece reaching its maximum travel. I do not want to just keyframe, the whole thing, I would like to rig it.

[CJI]

In maya i would probably do this with set driven keys, in Cinema 4d it would be simple to set up an Expresso system to deal with it. Im just back in 3DS Max recently after a long time animating in maya so im still familiarising myself with animating in it so i don't know Max' system yet. Sorry if this was no help whatsoever, if i reach the eureka stage with max before anyone else responds i will let you know. Good Luck.

[nelpiper]

I think your best option is to use bones to have real time interaction. Also, add up to that constraints to limit your moves. Because you want to have control over different parts of your model, you need different pivots and that's what bones are all about. The kinf od rig you want is better done with bones systems, IMO. I don't know where you could find this but the MAX masterclass 2004 has a great great tutorial on rigging hidraulics. Good luck.

[MetalUrge]

Using Wire Parameters and assigning mathematical expressions for the follow-up movement could be the simplest way.

 

Like for example, you have 3 cylindrical telescopic tubes one inside the other. When you position-wire the inner most cylinder to the next cylinder (2nd one) and similarly the 2nd cylinder to the 3rd cylinder you can move it in a more mechanical way. When you pull out the 1st cylinder the 2nd and 3rd should follow. Now to make the follow-up more eventual and mechanical the expression text box can be used by dividing the existing connected expression by 2 (/2) or by any other mathematical requirement according to precision. In this way a /2 would follow-up the respective tubes by half movement.

[ihabkal]

10 years ago I read a tutorial about that in 3d studio for dos. they used invers kinematics and added limits to the movement of each part. It was pretty easy but I don't remember it.