Reply To: How would I rig an engine motor belt to go round and round (and round and round)?

[Harris Clook]

@dillenbata3 I haven’t gotten to this yet, I’ll refer back to your ideas when I do! I’ll keep working the leg setups for the time being.

I had another thought in regards to this though. I’m just watching through some of the videos in the offroad course. What I thought would be cool would be to set up something so I could essentially turn the engine on and have it stay perpetually on. The motors would spin, and the belt would loop around (with a little bit of wobble), and the engine itself would have a subtle gitter while it’s in an idle state. Then as the legs start to move, I could increase the engine speed. 

I’m just thinking aloud, but would I be better off setting up a custom property with a driver to manually adjust the engine speed (and all it’s related components) as I see fit? Or would there be a way to use the animation of the legs to drive the speed? – This option might be too intense for my current knowledge of rigging, so for the time being I’ll probably go with the first idea.
Or, I animate the speed in the graph editor itself rather than restricting it to a custom property (I’m guessing the graph editor will give the animator (me) more freedom). 

Again, just throwing ideas around, but is there a way to set something like this up? IE the engine speed varies by how much the legs are moving. Or is this a similar situation where I am likely to be over complicating things like in my IK properties question? It’s also probable that the engine’s animation isn’t going to visible at all times anyway.

I mentioned this to Wayne recently, but I think rigging might be where I’m having the most fun, and I’d like to push myself with it. I’m going to assume I’ll have a good time with animating – and those two go hand-in-hand – so I appreciate you lending your thoughts!