This week has been the most challenging one so far. Understandind which constraints nned to be made so that the movement is done has been a challenge. I divided the movement in 3 different parts: the wheel with the first horizontal piston, the pendant piston, and the second horizontal piston. For each movement I had to work with different locators, joints and iKhandle.
The first part of the movement, consisted on the wheel making circular movements, and the horizontal piston following that movement whilst making back and forth movements in an extra pipe. For this I hand animated the wheel, and cuse point constraints to set the piston to move.
The pendant part was the hardest to animate. I had to create a new locator so that the pendant would be centralised with the circular part of the asset. Also had to create new joints and ikhandle to create the movement.
Only by using the constraint, the vertical piston wasn’t giving a pendant movement, and I needed that so that th secont horizontal piston would move back and forth. It was also giving me bugs as shown in th video below.
To solve that, I had to place a few key frames, and the pendant movement worked.
The last movement part was the easiest one, since I was able to use a locator I already had before, and with only one constraint the horizontal pisont gave me the back and forth movement.
The result of all the rigging and animating was this: