How to rig a landing gear?

[Eric2575]

I kinda went overboard on modeling the FW190 from our excercise and want to rig the landing gear to fold up into the wing. I have never done any rigging and am not sure how to approach this. I've already assigned a bone to the landing gear assembly and have even got it to fold up into the wing. The problem is that the assembly not only needs to rotate up, but it also needs to twist a little bit along its vertical axis at the same time. Would two bones controlled by a parent bone do the trick? Can this be done with one bone and a couple of constraints?

 

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

This is a link to movie I threw together to show what I mean. It's got sound too. You can see at the end of the clip how the wheel needs to turn in order to tuck under the wing.

 

http://home.comcast.net/~pyglesias03/FW190wAudio.mov

[Eric2575]

I think this should be really simple, but I'm not that experienced with bones and rigging just yet. The way I see it, I need at least two bones to control the landing strut, the one I already have to retract the gear and a second one (child) to control the turn of the assembly as it tucks into the plane.

 

So, how does one make that work? As the first bone retracts the gear, the second one get's its cue from the first and starts to rotate in unison until everything is tucked under the wing.

 

Maybe I shoudl try rubber bands

[ChrisThom]

Have one that controls the main movements like you have then set up another bone and have the gear bone do a rotate like constraint. Here's a link to an example file.

 

Link

[Eric2575]

That's exactly what I needed. Thanks so much for not just an explanation but also the perfect prj file.

 

Ya made my day

 

Eric

 

Um, I may have spoken too soon...Like I said, I'm not that familiar yet with bones, relationships and rigging. I was hoping I'd figure out how you did that in the project file, but I'm not thinking too well right now. I riggrd the two bones and applied a Roll Like constraint in an On/Off pose? After that, I'm in limbo land. If you could just walk me through it, that would be sweeeeet.

[ChrisThom]

Sorry for the delay.

 

OK, it's like, stupid easy to do. Here are the steps and I'm assuming you know how to create and assign bones.

 

1) Once the model is done create two bones - one for each landing strut. Name them Strut-Left & Right or something simular so as not to get confused.

 

2) Create 2 additional bones and name them Retract and Rotate.

 

3) In the model window Rt click and select New -> Pose -> On/Off. This will open a new relationship window.

 

4) Go into Skeletal mode (F8) and for each strut bone, Rt Click New Constraint -> Orient Like and have the retract bone be the target. You'll see that however you now move the retract bone, the 2 strut bones will follow. Make sure you undo whatever movement you do.

 

5) In the same way assign a Rotate Like constraint for the struts with the Rotate bone as our target. The problem we have though is that all the bones are rotating in the same direction. There's an easy fix for this.

 

6) In the relationship window select the strut bone that you want to rotate in the opposite direction and in the PWS highlight Roll Like. Here's the key, in the properties window change the Roll Scale to -100. Now rotate the bone and they all should be rotating as they should.

 

There are more things you could do like adding expressions, assigning spherical constraints and sliders but this will get you going for now.

 

I've attached a sample mov & a new prj file for you to play with.

 

Movie

Project file

[Eric2575]

Thank you Chris.