Interlopers.net Forum - Half-Life 2 News & Tutorials

Hi, hello.

It has been a while since I asked for help here. Anyhow, I'm stuck with something in Max, I can't figure out how to rig the excavator bucket with a bunch of bones. Which is stupid.

The bones (begin bone and end bone) should stick to the dummies/helpers, and the other bones should be able to move around as they are being manipulated by a piston (missing from the images). Could someone please help me how I should rig/link/ik solve this. I tried various things but nothing works so-far.





Thanks in advance.

Ask help @ uni?

skoften wrote:Ask help @ uni?

No-one uses Max at school pretty much. So I don't think that will do me much.

This looks a lot more complicated than it is. The hardest thing is going to be making sure its modelled to be mechanically correct. The stuff you want to look at to rig it is :

IK Limb Solver
Look-At Constraint
Axis constraints

Smart use of those 3 things should cover everything you need.

The biggest problem with this kind of stuff is finding an accurate fulcrum, or pivot point. Sometimes these can be a bit counter-intuitive. I think if you concentrate on the fact that the pistons push and pull, and the hard sections rotate around the pins, you should be able to figure out where to place your bones. You're going to need some forward kinematics as well as inverse kinematics if you want it to animate largely automatically. Don't forget to limit the rotation to one axis per joint and don't skimp on the hidden control bones!

I can't really offer much more advice. for the Assistolumundus I had to do a little bit of fancy forward kinematics. It's a far cry from your excavator there, but I guess some concepts would remain.

Someone helped me a couple of days ago by linking me a thread on polycount, I haven't had time to try it out yet but it seems they have a way to achieve what I'm looking for.

Thanks everyone for the help so-far. I hope I'll be able to get it working with all this info.