Reply To: Collab 2020: Modeling Heavy Equipment (Backhoe)

[Shawn Blanch]

Everything but 1 piece works great. The one piece is just an interference issue and not an operation issue (see item 3 below).

It took 2 days for my brain to wrap around what needed to be assigned so that all the parts moved in unison and moved believably. I kept getting 75% of the way with the rigging and the last 25% ate up most of my creative juices because the top of the assembly kept wanting to rotate around in a circle (ended up disconnecting everything haha). 

I made an empty for each joint and then went to town parenting stuff together and gave just a few objects some constraints to damp track, copy location, and copy rotation where needed. At the end of the day I got it to work beautifully by just rotating 2 different empties (one at the front of the main loader arm and one at the back of the same loader arm) and I had to constrain a 3rd empty to copy the rotation of the front empty in order for the top hydraulic bar to stay pointing in line with the shovel rather than just rotating in a circle or flopping like a rag doll.Not too bad. Now I can adjust the assembly as needed with only 2 empties for the time being. When it comes time for the rigging I will rethink things and add actual bones for Wayne to give him a head start and I think I can make some cool looking “dynamic curved arrows” as the bones to signify they will rotate the assembly. 

I’m actually really happy I did this because I noticed a couple of interfering parts in the assembly as I was rotating everything up and down and this rigging is going to help a little with my side of the adjustments. 

Here are issues I currently see on the front end:

1. The battery box and loader arms are clashing where the fuel fill on the drivers side is currently installed. @dostovel I will post a photo and lets work together. 

2. The loader bucket and arms need some adjustments. My main loader arms need to shorten a little because they are passing through the bucket mesh, and the hinge locations are going to need to be sorted out. @pfbourassa and I will sort this out. I might need to fix item 3 first though……..

3. My angle bracket @theluthier  gave feedback on in the live stream (regarding non-uniform thickness) is interfering when the upper hydraulic extends it. The angle bracket pushes forward and stabs into the top or bottom pieces that it is hinged to (or both haha I can’t remember now) and looks ugly. It only does this when the upper hydraulic is fully extended. I referenced the images and videos online again and I believe the angle bracket is not as angled as I made it out but I am having a hard time figuring out what it should be because everything looks symmetrical about the main loader arm. I’ll post some images when I get off work. This is a problem only to do with me and no one else so I’ll get with me to figure this out. But I would appreciate some guidance as this one has me scratching my head a little. Images to come later…..