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

[Dwayne Savage]

With the armature there are 2 goals to answer.

For positioning goal: you would select the wiper and position the origin to the base edge loop. Then alt+g, alt+s, alt+r to clear all transforms. Then press / to go to local view(aka isolation mode). Tab into edit mode. Rotate and move wiper if needed. The only part that is important on alignment here is the base’s bottom needs to sit on the XY plane just like you want it to sit on that face. Next step is to rig it. You will need 3 bones minimum. A root bone that is aligned to the world axis. A base bone that is aligned to the base and a arm bone for animating wiper arm. Additional bones you may want to add for advance animation later are a bone for the truck and one for the blade(the rubber piece of the wiper). As for aligning it depends on if you add a bone for the truck. If you do then you want to align using the wiper base bone. If not then you can align with base or root bone. While in pose mode add a shrink wrap constraint to the bone and point to the truck as the target. I’m not sure if you want project or target normal project method. It should be one of them. The on surface. The. Move the bone until you are on the face you want. Once it’s in place press Ctrl+a->visual transform to pose. Now you can remove the shrinkwrap bone constraint and the bones will stay in that position. 

Edit: forgot to mention that you can apply the armature modifier instead of applying to pose if you don’t plan on using the armature for animation. If this is the case then you only need 1 bone.