How to rig a lamp?!

[-MerlyN-]

Hi all!

 

I need your help. I modeled my desk lamp, and now I want to rig it so all parts of the lamp behave as they are supposed to. For a normal armed lamp thats no big deal, just link it together and assign an IK solver.

 

The tricky part, that turns my hair grey, is the lower arm between Nodes 3 and 2. As you can see in the attached images, it consists of three wires. Two of those make up the arm, the third, I've named it 'N2-3_Link', is set a back and attached to some struts, that extend from the joints Node2 and Node3. This wire limits the rotation of Node_2.

 

My problems now are, 1st, that I have no idea how to restrict the rotation of Node_3 to only the Z axis, and 2nd, how to attach the third wire N2-3_Link to the IK_Solver.

 

I am pretty sure, that it can be done, probably fairly easily, too, but I dont see how. Can anyone explain this?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Merl

 

PS: Ive attached a render of the lamp, a screenshot of my hierarchy, and also the file (MAX2011, VRay 1.5SP5)

[-MerlyN-]

Hm, no replies yet? Maybe I've ran into a problem not so easy to solve after all... Well, if anyone has an idea on how to solve this, I'd really love to hear it!

 

-Merl

[nelpiper]

It seems to me a work to IK. Maybe you can think of it as just for characters but that's not true. Go to The Area and look for Loui Marcoux blog. He's got some pretty cool tutorials in rigging using IK. The cool thing is with IK all happens in realtime. Good luck.

[-MerlyN-]

Thanks a lot, Nelson.

 

Had a look at Loui's tutorials (some nice ones in there) and sure enough found the solution. A simple look at constraint did the trick. I knew it would be simple