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Bicycle pedal to always point upwards, but follow a wheel
Hi, I have been animating a bike in my spare time, designing it in Photoshop.
It uses seperate layers – bike frame, front wheel, rear wheel, pedal cog, pedal 1, pedal 2.
My objective is to be able to animate all layers via just controlling the front wheel – it’d be handy to be able to ease out position and rotation using just the front wheel, and its kinda fun to problemsolve.
My problem is that I need the pedals to continually face upwards.
I have my rear wheel’s rotation parented to my front wheel’s rotation.
The pedal cog rotation has an expression linked to the front wheel’s rotation, but times this number by 0.25 – so that it runs slower.
The pedals are parented to the pedal cog so that they spin around with it, seemingly around the cog’s anchor point (although they have their own).
But I have not been able to get the pedals to continually face upwards.
Auto-orientation (Layer>Transform>Auto-Orient) doesn’t work as the pedals don’t follow a path as such, just parented to the rotation of the cog.
Any ideas?
I have considered motion tracking to stabalize them to point upwards. Also wondereing if parenting is the way to go to afix the pedals to the pedal cog (is there a way to stick an anchor point to follow another object?)
Thanks in advance.
Will Moindrot
university of lincoln
hull
ukAfter Effects Pro 6.5
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3 Replies
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There are probably a few ways to do this. Expressions are not my strong point and I’m not on my workstation at the moment so I can’t test my idea out, but I think I’ve got one.
If you pickwhip your pedal’s rotation to the cog’s rotation and add *-1 to it. Then your pedal should be rotating exactly opposite what the cog is. Giving the illusion of staying upright.
Hopefully someone wiser than me will pipe up soon.
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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Like the Great one I do not dabble in expressions much in AE. However, Why not take what you have so far but use a null instead of your pedal. The null will rotate, but then pick whip the null position ONLY to the pedal position. That way if the pedal is facing up it has no reason to rotate. Only the position from the null will move the pedal.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
great ideas, I will try this out
Thanks!!
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