After getting a better grasp on bone dynamics I made a little clock and some gears. The clock runs for 12 hours, sped up. I would have made it real time, but I don't think anyone would want to sit though that.
The hour hand and the fancy gear are angle bone controlled to the minute hand and larger gear respectively. Gears are pretty easy and fun to make.
I tried to make a cam too, looks like you can not use position control bones, that are controlled by a bone that is moved by another rotating bone.
Nice work. I hope you don't mind, but I downloaded your clock, upscaled the time line and then imported it to my mobile phone. You know, It keeps time pretty well! Thanks.
I don't mind at all, I'm thrilled.
Here is the anme file.
It contains the clock, the gears and the cam that I did not get working.
I did try to attempt to get the clock to work off of actions. The action "resets" the angle back to 90 every time, instead of continually adding 360 to the number. Which makes all the sense in the world, but it was worth a shot anyways.
Bones can rotate "forever". The rotation continues to increase as you rotate it so you could just "wind the clock" on a later frame to make it repeat. A layer script could do it as well... use the frame number to increase the rotation of a bone. Or even better use a bone to control the speed and rotation of the gears. You could link it to the scale of a bone and then change direction, speed etc by scaling that bone on different key frames.
Two great ideas.
Thank you Synthsin75, a train or car engine was what I was thinking about with my little cam idea.. more studying of anme files..
Vern,
I realize I would have to lean lua scripting. But are you telling me I could script a layer animation to basically go for as may frames as I want?
Then have a scale bone to control it all. *deep breath*
Could it then be possible to have this scale bone controlled by another bone.
Say a large clockwork machine. and a little lever that can be "pulled" to start and stop it all? Kind of completely insane to do something like that, but it could then be a dynamically animatable machine. I think I better get to bed soon before my brain explodes... thinking of using Genete's 3D rig in conjunction with all this and make some crazy 3D geared clock tower or something steampunk. mecha?
Well, I managed to make 2.5D gears. What a pain! All the gears look the same, because, well they are. I went through a few other gears first before perfecting this one. This thing has so many bones that I can barely scrub though the time line. I liked it so much though that I submitted it to the gallery.
I'm now fighting with uploading to youtube.
Here is the current version.
