Reply To: Mystery rig with mystery bones
Hi Dwayne,
I need to resurrect this thread because I’ve come across a puzzling issue and have more questions. I hope that’s alright. I sort of reverse engineered the demo rig you provided to see how you got the doors to move the way you wanted, and only the way you wanted.
I’m trying to use the space station in a project and I had a big design decision to make. I couldn’t use your rig because the doors opened in and out, but the hangar doors need to slide open like shower doors. So I set up a rig to do that. The design principle is a central root bone aligned along the world space Z-axis, with 8 mech rig bones extending from it like one of those whirly swing rides at the carnival.
This design is what I chose because it keeps the doors aligned with the space station hull as the rotate open and closed. (The screenshot shows much more door movement than what is actually needed so that I could illustrate the principle.)
This rig works great as long as the root bone’s local Y-axis is aligned with the world space Z-axis and I rotate the MECH_Door bones around the world space Z-axis (using either the Rotate gizmo or the R+Z keyboard shortcut).
Things break down if I tilt or rotate the armature object or the root bone away from being aligned with the world Z-axis. I’m searching for a way to constrain the rotation of the MECH bones around the local Y-axis of the root bone, no matter which way the root bone is aligned in world space.
I’m providing a link to my (huge) file in case you need it. I deleted any existing constraints and the control bones that I used to control each pair of doors so that I could try and work out the logic without ending up in constraint hell.
Thanks for any help you (or anyone else) can give!
-Jeff
Link to .blend file: SpaceStationRigged (It may not be fully uploaded yet; please be patient.)