My first IK setup

[omeone]

Hi all, Ive just dived into the weird and wonderful world of IK, I spent a lot of time searching for tutorials, to get a better understanding, and while there are lot out there that take you throught he process step bt step, I couldn't find one that focused on all the problems that seem to pop up, ways to avoid them, understanding it's workings and non-workings. If anyone knows of something like that, I'd love to hear about it.

Anyway, I'm attaching my first "rig", if any of you experts can take a minute to look at it, and make comments or suggestions about ways to improve etc. I'd appreciate it.

It's a very basic setup for my Tram on the WIP board, but it caused me hours of headaches (though I learned a heck of a lot) caused mainly by me trying to over-complicate it, could it be simplified even more?

Cheers
(only 10kb ;))

[omeone]

Oh, and the next question is...
the next step is to animate the doors opening when stopped, would anyone recommend either using morph targets with an expression related to speed or a proximty value Or using Motion mixer (I have never used M. Mixer or written expressions before :D )

[fourd]

Well, it looks pretty good. Only thing I noticed was that when I raised the motion path in the "+y/-y" axis, your train fell apart, so you need to work on that for a complet animaible train. But it's a very nifty animation.

As far as door's opening, I would do it with MorphMixer... But I guess you could write an expression based on velocity, that says when train velocity=0 thaen open doors. You would need to set a time the doors remain open for then close them after that time, and have the train move again..I would just use morphs though, much easier for me..:rolleyes:

[omeone]

Thanks for that FourD! I have it fixed now, I just had to add IK to the pitch of the centre bones and make them stiff.

One weird thing popped up though, the bogies (the front and back wheel assemblies) are Motion controlled by Follower. Now I have to multiply the Pitch roatation channel by -1.0, (I wish I understood why...)

Check it out now - it's a rollercoaster!