Help with rigging and animating please

[wjs7744]

Hi, I'm modeling the 16" guns from a USN Iowa class battleship, and am trying to animate them for rotation and recoil, but I'm not having any success. Can anyone give me a hand? I'm using Lightwave 9 and have tried using two bones, one for rotating the turret, and one for elevating the guns, but I can't get it to work properly. Here's what I have so far, and please, no comments about the model, I did it in about half an hour from memory. I would like to know how to do it properly now I have source photos to work from.

[giant551]

Hey there, animate it using nulls, 2 nulls one controlling the rotation of the turret and the other the elevation of the guns.

parent the turret to the rotate null, parent the barrels to the elevation null then finally parent the elevation null to the rotate null. Then you can keyframe the movement, easy !!

cheers

Paul

[wjs7744]

And that's better than using bones to animate, is it? I would have thought it the other way round. One thing, though, these guns have what looks like rubber at the base of the barrels, how do I deform this using nulls and things?

[giant551]

Well its just one way of doing it, there is nothing to stop you parenting the bone to a rotate null. But i think two controllers is the way ahead.:D

[Martocticvs]

That's the way I handle gun turrets as well. Not the only way but I think its the simplest... as for the blast bags, you could perhaps use an expression to control the deformation, tied to the elevation of the barrels.

[wjs7744]

Sounds complicated. I tried setting the heading and pitch controllers of the turret and barrels respectively to point to a null object, to simplify aiming them, but it didn't work. The gun turned OK, but the barrels pointed in a different direction, I don't know why. I'll have to look up expressions, though, if I'm to use them instead of bones to deform my model. I've never used them before so it's good that I'm learning new things.

[Hitori Kyo]

make sure u have the turrent, barrels and ship as seperate objects ... also make sure they are parented in the right order. The turrent would be parented to the ship and the barrels would be parented to the turrent.

- Hitori kyo

[wjs7744]

Thanks for the advice, but I think I've found a better way. Instead of using nulls, I parent the layers together directly, and setting the pivot point for each layer rather than using a lot of nulls. This helps as it almost halves the number of objects associated with the model in layout. If there's anything wrong with doing it this way, please someone tell me, but I can't think of any reason to us nulls over this.

[giant551]

well there's always at least 10 ways of doing most things in 3D:D But ive never been a fan of animating pivots, it can go horribly wrong:)

[Martocticvs]

I tend to tie all these sorts of things to sliders and make a big control panel so I can keep tabs on everything... but it can be a bit annoying I admit - each barrel needs to be rigged separately because in real life they moved independently of each other, unlike on most model kits! But generally with the slider method things aren't too bad when it comes to animating.