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gear animation with dynamics
Is there a way to animate interlocking gears using only dynamics such as colliders, without having to use expresso? I’d like to be able to rotate one gear and the other gears would react to the dynamics, perhaps using hinge connector.
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8 Replies
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I just did a gear-heavy animation and was wondering the same thing, whether it could be done with Motors. I didn’t have time to do a lot of research on the feasibility, so I went with Xpresso. I’m not what you would call an Xpresso whiz, but the process was fairly straightforward. It’s just a matter of calculating the ratio of the gears based on the number of teeth on each gear. Say a 6 tooth gear is driving an 18 tooth gear. For every 1 rotation of the smaller gear, the bigger gear rotates .3333333. If the gears are rotating along their heading you’d feed the Rotation.H node of the 6 tooth gear into the input of a Math:Multiply node. The other input would be -.333333. Then feed the output of that into the Rotation.H input of the 18 tooth gear, and there you go. Animate the heading of the 6 tooth gear and the 18 tooth gear will follow.
Or perhaps you knew all that and just wanted to do it differently.
And here’s a strange side note. I initially read this post on an iPad. When I went to reply on my Mac in Safari 5.1.2 this post was no where to be seen, even after emptying the cache and quitting and restarting the program. So I went to Firefox, and there it was, so that’s how I’ve replied here. Weird.
Good luck.
Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics -
Thanks Shawn, no I didn’t know all that. I’m fairly new to C4D all together so I haven’t played with Xpresso much. Sounds pretty straight forward with the multiply node, I’ll have it a go.
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Hi again,
FYI I’ve work it out with dynamics. First gear is set as a collider and keyframed to rotate.Second gear is set as a rigid body, then connected to a base with a connector (hinge). But what I was missing is that both dynamics tags should have their collision shape set to MOVING MESH.
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Glad to know you got it to work. I’ll have to play around with dynamics for that next time.
Shawn
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How do you prevent the gears from taking on gravity when they collide? I can’t figure out the correct procedure for isolating the rotation and preventing all other movement. Thank you in advance.
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the Collider gear will stay where you put it but the Rigid Dynamics gear needs to be attached with a Connector – Francois said he used a Hinge.
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I got it to work using a hinge connector in the middle of my paddle. When other objects run into paddles, they turn as expected.
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I got it to work using a hinge connector in the middle of my paddle. When other objects run into paddles, they turn as expected.
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