How I can animate a Big Wheel

[halas]

I am a beginner user of Lightwave, now I am try to animate Big Wheel but I failed.... I want the seats or chair connect to the wheel move with wheel but stay on the right direction.

[pooby]

match goal orientation

[Red_Oddity]

Or put an expression motion modifier on the bucket, like :

-1 * [Wheel.Rotation.B]

In this case you're counter animating the main wheel's rotation on the bucket.

[Red_Oddity]

Another cool thing you could do is create a polygon or 2d poly chain (with weight painted hinges) and parent those to wheel and run dynamics on the polygons/2d poly chains (when weighted properly they stick to the weheel but keep pointing down while swaying a bit).
Now you can either parent your bucket to those polygons or use a aimconstraint together with a plugin like Parent2Point (http://www.interialabs.de/lw/lscript/index.html) to keep the buckets in place.

[walfridson]

You could have nulls follow along the wheel at the connect point.
Then for the seats apply ex follower under motion modifier and only use XZY from the specified null.

[starbase1]

Cmon guys, as a beginner he could probably use a bit more detail than that!

Model your main wheel and one chair assembly separately, (or in separate layers). You will probably want the support assembly that doesn't spin in a 3rd layer.

Model your main wheel with it's centre at the origin, so it is easy to spin.
Model your chair assembly with the point it swivels around at the origin.

I'd strongly suggest getting one chair working first.

Go to layout, and load up the three layers.
Position the support structure, and parent the main wheel to it. Move it into place.
I suggest working on a number of frames equal to one spin to start with, so choose this to get a good rate of spin. (probably a lot of frames!)
Go to the end frame and set the rotation to one complete turn. (This will probably be a rotation in pitch)

Go back to the start frame, and parent your chair to the wheel, and move it into position. if you slide along the time scale now, you should see it move around the wheel, but pointing in the wrong direction most of the time.

If you go to the end frame, you can now add counter rotation (opposite to the wheel, so if that was +360 give the chair -360), and everything should work well.

Repeat for cloned copies of the other chairs.

[WilliamVaughan]

This is pretty much the same thing:
http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/tutorials/animation/gear-expression/index.html

[pooby]

Cmon guys, as a beginner he could probably use a bit more detail than that!


I admit that my response wasn't exactly a comprehensive tutorial, but that's all part of the fun. To find out what that tool is and read up on it, then discover for yourself how you could put it to use.

[pva]

Dr. wheel rotator, if you find him you'll do it :)

[colkai]

I admit that my response wasn't exactly a comprehensive tutorial, but that's all part of the fun. To find out what that tool is and read up on it, then discover for yourself how you could put it to use.
:agree:
Sometimes, just for the heck of it, I try several ways of doing the same thing simply to see the different workflows and results. Of course, I am slightly odd. ;)

[halas]

Hi,
Thanks for all these information, I will try these techniques, and I hope to solve this problem.......... and because I am a bignner user, I need more details.

[halas]

Hi, guys
At Last I done the Big wheel animation, and the seats move correctly with the wheel. But I have a question: I want wheel to rotate and stop on some frames and start moving again on the other frame.... and how can I delay the speed of the wheel.

[pooby]

Keyframes on the rotation channel of the wheel. Then play with the TCB settings in the graph editor.

[halas]

Thanks

[Surrealist.]

I would tend to steer away from any "hard" links to the rotation of the wheel for the basket.

The reason for this is for one, it is not that hard to simply counter-rotate the bucket; secondly you have to allow for inertia, delay, and and the follow through (swing back and forth at the stop point) as a result of inertia and gravity.

Basically due to gravity the basket will at first delay slightly then begin to rotate as it is pulled down to the ground by gravity.

Then when the big wheel stops, the basket will follow through and sway back and forth.

There is not really any time where the basket is really fully just rotating exactly in concert with the wheel when you take all of these real world physics into account.

So you can a) key frame it with realism of the actual weight in mind. That would translate into the speed of the delay at the start and inertia follow-through sway speed at the stop.

or b) come up with a dynamics or other solution that will calculate this autoimatically.

I have been playing around with an idea based on this video (ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Hardlink.mov).

If it is successful I will post the results.

Otherwise with this in mind maybe someone has a bright idea.

[Surrealist.]

Also, as I am walking home from dinner I realized there is another aspect to this.

Because gravity is linear - for the most part lets say for practical application in this case - and the wheel is not, you have another thing to consider.

There are gradients of motion that could be split up into 4 zones around the wheel. Think of the wheel as a clock. At 12 and 6 you have a peek drag of motion due to gravity pitted against the inertia. This would be the peek of delay at start and and the peek of the follow through (sway) at the stop. These two zones would be consistent yet opposite in motion of course on a stop and start motion. In other words there would be the same pull and drag on the mass from gravity and inertia.

At 3 and 9 you have a different situation. At the start both are already oriented toward the direction of gravity and because of where they fall on the curve of the wheel there is virtually no delay of motion on the start.

But on the stop they are both technically turning and oriented relatively in the same orientation of the rest of the baskets. So they will sway at about the same amount when the wheel stops.

Then you have a gradient of this effect from 6 to 9 and from 6 to 3. Then another from 13 to 9 and 12 to 3.

Now add to this the fact that each bucket at any time ins flowing through it's own curve of this effect as it moves around the wheel, so that too would be dynamic based on its position at any given time in the rotation.

Just something more theory to plug into the equation.