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  • Rigid body not following main object?

    Posted by Scott Mills on January 15, 2015 at 1:28 am

    So I have a big octopus that has 6 gears for a face.
    -One gear in the center that spins and is a rigid body static mesh.
    -Around it are 5 other gears that are being spun by the first gear. They are moving mesh and attached to a wheel connector.

    The problem is that when I keyframe the octopus to move around, the 5 surrounding gears stay where they are and don’t follow the rest of the octopus. When I switch them to static mesh they follow like the first one, but they aren’t affected by the first gear anymore.

    I swear I’ve tried changing every combination of options on the body tags of both the main and 5 surrounding gears. I’ve wasted 5 hours at this point and decided, why the heck and I searching endlessly on the internet forums when I could just join the community and ask a specific question. This is my job now after all, hehe. Hope someone can help!

    -Thanks! -R16

    Scott Mills replied 11 years, 8 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • Brian Jones

    January 15, 2015 at 4:23 am

    haven’t done much moving gears but it should move properly, at least in animation – when you are keyframing the gears won’t follow at all but they should when you rewind and hit play. But it might depend on construction…

  • Scott Mills

    January 15, 2015 at 8:31 am

    Hey, thanks for quick reply.

    In animation or otherwise the moving mesh (outside gears) stay where they are while the rest of the octopus swims around. If I change them to static mesh, they move around properly with everything else, but are not turned by the centre gear.

    I ended up giving up for now and saving a separate file and just calculating the gears to move in sync all on static mesh so they appear to be working together, but really it’s just math.

    HOWEVER, it appears that I just have the worst luck with rigid bodies, because now that I’m animating my octopus the tentacles are intersecting my gears. I’ve tried rigid, collider, even crashed the program trying cloth, tried on group and on each individual tentacle, but to no avail, still slipping. I don’t understand what I could be doing wrong. It there some universal setting that could be screwing it all up? I’ve poked around with dynamics in the project settings, but still nothing. So confused. It’s like bodies are just turned off now.

    This unfortunately I can’t bypass… Here you can see the left 2 tentacles passing through the speakers.

  • Adam Trachtenberg

    January 15, 2015 at 5:14 pm

    I’m a little confused as to your current setup, but basically anything that’s a moving mesh can only be moved by another dynamic object, whether it’s another moving mesh or a keyframed static object. Maybe this stripped down scene will help.

    Scene File: 8404_gearsmoving.c4d.zip

  • Scott Mills

    January 16, 2015 at 3:22 am

    A ha! They need an invisible centre axis! That solves that problem. Thank you so much 🙂

    Now I just have to make my tentacles solid? I thought maybe they were moving too fast, but I turned up subframes to 100 to no avail. They are a 24 joint IK setup. I want to turn the strength down a lot so they are much more floppy, because they just stretch back out to full extension after half a second, but if I turn down the strength they just go through everything all the time…

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