Triax Weightmapping pistons and other telescoping joints. Is it possible?

Tramp Graphics

Syrus_Dante said:

Nice work, you made it. I see you already set limits on these x rotation and y translation properties.

While watching my old post I see I must have somehow missed to give the link to the Image series and the sceenshots I've talked about.

Sorry for that here they are: DS Rigging a Piston at imgbb.com

At Rigging_Piston_036.png you can see how I've created a new pose control property. Then I've posed the Figure_Piston and added that pose to the Ctrl_Piston_Up-Down property with ERC-Freeze.

With the footswitch of the ram figure you could also do some ERC-Freeze to have pose control properties for easy animating that can be accesed in the Parameters pane with the figure body node selected, instead of moving the bones around individualy.

But since this is a short secquence animation you may need about 4 keyframes on the timeline to rotate the footswitch down followed by the piston.

In ERC-Freeze there is an option called Keyed (Extract from Play Range) with this you can save a sequence of timeline frames to a property slider this can be useful sometimes.

 

Actually, the only two bones on the entire figure, aside from the "hip" bone, are the piston and the pedal, so there isn't any complex rigging. Thankfully. It's probably tjhe most basic rig I have ever had to do.