Animated staging

[Anonymous]

Hi all, im trying to work on an animation and im now lost to what to do, I have a feeling Im probably doing it wrong from the start. But any help would be appreciated.

It should be pretty simple, its a folding staging where the corners all need to stay constrained, but half way through the animation it doesn't constrain, as you can see for the image attached. 

Im also attaching the max file, for you to have a look and tell me how I could possibly fix this.. 

Cheers,

Adam

[leeminardi]

The file you posted appears to have no rigging just keyframes for the initial and final position and rotation of the components.  The file does not have the problems you circled in the jpg.

The staging can be considered as 4 identical scissor mechanisms each on a different plane. You could create expression controllers to relate the rotation of say, one of the "X" cylinders to the other components.  For example, the rotation of cylinder060 would drive the rotation of cylinder059 (its angle of rotation would be the same but in the opposite direction). The position of Box029 could also be related to the rotation of cylinder060.

Rather than having the pivot of cylinder059 and cylinder060 at their centers I would place it at one end. This would make the math easier for the location of the other components and other "assemblies".

I would start by rigging the components shown below and getting them to work correctly. They could be linked to a common dummy and then have 4 copies made.  The location of the copies would also require an expression controller.  An interesting challenge!

Note, there are some minor misalignments of the capsules and pivot points in your model.  Make a clean copy of just the objects in the picture above and I will give the rigging a try. Since this is a planar mechanism it helps to have all the pivots on the same plane.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the feedback, I can already see my mistakes, im not an animator by any stretch, so any help is great. Heres a clean version of the model, zero linking, if you could have a look that would be amazing.

Cheers,

Adam

[leeminardi]

I rigged the scissor action for one side of the staging by using a Wire Parameter to control one leg of the "X" when the other leg (named X1) is rotated. I created an expression controller for the z position of the block at the top corner that is a function of the rotation of X1.  I linked all of the components of one side to Dummy001 so that the expression controller  could be moved or rotated anywhere in space.  I then made 3 copies of the assembly and rotated them by 90°, 180°, and 270°and positioned them at the corners.  I linked dummy002 to the pin of the first side, dummy003 to the second side pin, etc..  Note, it is important to uncheck the Inherit x rotation after linking as you want the assembly to translate without rotation as X1 rotates.

I think the final rig works fairly well.  Just rotate object X1 (I have labeled it).

  File staging_clean10 is one side of the staging and 11 is the full staging.

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much for this, I can now work backwards to understand it. top work.. 🙂