In order to animate the swing arm on the right, I remodeled the structure on the arm. I separated the two pistons on the side with the upper arm, so that it can move and swing. I deleted the edges in between and bridged for each model, so now they are all separate and ready to get rigged.
I did the same way as I rigged the wheels. I moved the locators under the pistons, so they will follow the movement as the arm is swinging. I combined the two pistons, then aim constrained them with the top locator and point constrained with the bottom locator.
In order to animate the wheel, I had to change the structure of the wheel and pistons. I switched the positions of the two wheels, so that the vertical piston can moves with the smaller wheel up and down while the wheels are rotating.
I moved the components followed one by one, which is the parent and child. So when I select the first wheel and move, everything will be moving or rotating together. I also created two locators at the joints for doing the constrains. I moved the locator1 under the joint here so I don’t need to do constrains, instead, the locator which is a child of this joint will moved with it.
Before doing the constrain, the most important thing is to make sure everything is zeroed out and they are in the right position. I did a point constrain and aim constrain for the vertical piston with the locator to make it follow the movement of the locator when the wheels are rotating.
We simply did a rough render and rough comp to see how it looks in general. The hand, bird cage, and the spheres were created in Maya, and other things were downloaded online. We are going to put grass around the rocks. We also had another idea that if we should replace the whales with smoke effects.
I was confused when I was doing the meter part. So I searched online to figure out how to do topology around the area.
In this video, first is to charmer the center vertex to create a rhombus surface, and then use multi-cut tool to cut from the middle of the edges to the four corner points of the outer surface. So there will be a octagon surface. Delete the middle faces, and combine the surface with the tube, last is to bridge those edges.
After I understood how it works, I did the same steps as how it does in the video. I cut out a round shape surface on the cylinder, and then combine small cylinder with the large cylinder in order to bridge the edges. I adjust the final shape and added more edge loops to smooth it.
We learned how to do an animation of this flywheel with constrains
First is to create the base model.
I created two locators, and snapped them to the center point of the two small pistons. Moving the flywheel locator under the flywheel is to let the locator follow the flywheel when it rotates.
The principle of doing constrain is to select the target that will take control first. I used aim constrain and point constrain to allow each part follows the movement of the flywheel one by one. I aim constrained the piston locator with the piston group first, and then I aim constrained the flywheel locator with piston sleeve group, lastly I point constrained the flywheel locator with the piston group.
The Belt
Next, I created the belt with a pipe polygon and stretched it into a belt shape. It’s very tricky to align the vertices with the two handles. I need to rotate some vertices more towards the center to smooth it. It took me some time to align the vertices.
Texture
I created a grid in hypershade and increased the value of Repeat UV to 40. In UV Editor, in order to make sure it’s nice and clean, the edges need to be scaled inwards to be straightened. The UV shell was scaled and rotated to fit the grid.
There was a problem that the texture was stretched if I smooth it. That is because the subdivision is not enough, so I inserted a couple of edge loops to smooth it.
Although it looks good on this side, the other side is not perfect. It still has the same problem and I don’t know how to solve it.
Animation
A tricky way to animate the belt is to animate the texture, just to key the value of Offset. So there will be only the texture moving, but it looks like the belt is moving.
In Shape Editor, I created a top bend shape and a bottom bend shape. I dragged the vertices of top bend down, and the vertices of bottom bend up. I want to make the two points move up and down while the belt is moving, so that the belt will not be moving mechanically, and it will look more realistic. I set keys for the two bends, and I added more keys in Graph Editor.
Now it moves more like a real belt, and it looks elastic and smooth.
