Reply To: Fixing object orientation/parent to allow proper animation

After doing some rigging work on a space station with Dwayne, I’m revisiting this tram thing (a year later) to get some practice with my new rigging skills.

The armature’s Root bone is represented by a wireframe box around the whole mesh, and the entire mesh is parented to it.

The MECH bones are aligned with each wiper’s motor spindle. I moved the origin of each wiper object to the center of its spindle and aligned its Z-axis with the normal of the body face to which it’s attached. The end result is that rotating the MECH bone around its Y-axis will rotate the wiper around its spindle’s Z-axis.

Getting the geometry in place and aligned correctly was the hardest part of this exercise. It only took about 30 minutes to do the rig and work out the driver logic.

I think this is a much simpler and much better rig than what I did last time. Then, I didn’t use an armature. Instead I used empties and constraints and Euler order changes.

Rig:

Drivers & Constraints:

Animation: