Little help with car steering rigging !

[a.quaihoi]

Hi people , am trying to rig up a RC car steering but am getting no joy - the first bit is easy - but I need to do the other half - so far have tried constrain to / roll / dynamic but havent got it working

 

 

The selected bone is the driver / main - then there is a bone on the tie rod to the pinion, which goes to the swing arm to another pinion and one bone for the hub

 

 

Now when I move the main bone which is from the servo steering in a RC car the other bones should work in chain - but I dont know how to set the constraints - can anyone give me some pointers please , would be much appreciated , I'll continue to tinker in the mean time

[robcat2075]

Hmmm.

 

It may not be entirely possible because of the freedom that IK chains need to work.

 

 

 

Here is a partial solution...

 

SteeringMechanism 03.prj

 

Look at Action 1 from a top view and rotate "bone 3" (the short one)

 

(click on this gif if it doesn't animate)

 

 

 

Some how "bone 3" needs to get controlled by some different IK chains. I'll think about it some more.

 

 

The most expedient thing would be to make a pose slider that moves all the bones as they are expected to move and then drive the pose slider with the steering wheel.

 

 

[robcat2075]

Here is another piece of the mechanism.

 

The arm on the left is being rotated, which appears to cause the next link to push the last link in a linear fashion. It is the opposite of an IK chain and yet we can't use a simple non-IK chain of bones to make this work.

 

Right now it only works if the first two bones are of equal length.

 

(click image if it doesn't animate)

 

The next problem is to get the end of the last bone to push around the tip of the first bone in the previous post.

 

 

 

 

[a.quaihoi]

Thanks Robcat ! I was playing with Ik and it works but it needs to be reversed some how - I like the idea of the pose slider too let me have another go with the above setups included into the rig !

[Guest]

You might have more success if you treated every joint as a roll constraint as I did on my locomotive. Typically I've aimed the roll handle at the other end of the link.

 

 

The downside is that "roll like" or "aim roll at" constraints may only get you so far. You then have no choice but to key frame the end of the linkage. But since your animating a recurring action you only have to put that time in once. I've attached an avi showing my result.

 

 

one_rev_c.avi

[pixelplucker]

You many need to use some nulls and rig it backwards. Long long time ago I had a character riding a bike and the chain would move with the cranks etc. Was tricky as hell but I had 2 ik chains operating off a null on the cranks with nulls on pedals. I would rotate the cranks, pedals would stay oriented to the world, feet followed that and made the legs bend and hips move. Upper body attached to handle bars with nulls on handles. Crank turning also moved the chain to the rear wheel and front wheel would roll like the rear.

 

Not sure how helpful that is in AM world.