Rigging a desk lamp/mechanisms for in-game usage

mogorodnik

Hi everyone,

Looking for some advise\general direction\links on how to rig this kind of a desk lamp http://i.stack.imgur.com/r3T8S.jpg and similar mechanisms for in-game usage, preferably in Blender. After spending a day on google i am officially stumped, as every video i've watched was geared towards general animation, with rigs built using in-package tools such as drivers, splines, hooks, etc. and, if i understand correctly, a video game rig should rely entirely on bones, right? Would really appreciate any help on this.

Thanks.

huffer

Use bones but set influence on whole elements - for example, the top arm bone has its pivot aligned on the screws, and influences all the metal parts of the top arm, with a soft fallof on the cable.

mogorodnik

huffer said:

Use bones but set influence on whole elements - for example, the top arm bone has its pivot aligned on the screws, and influences all the metal parts of the top arm, with a soft fallof on the cable.

Thanks for the response. I should've specified exactly what i'm talking about. I'm familiar with the general rigging process of making a skeleton and weight-painting the mesh, having made a simple human rig and animated it. The problems i'm having are more of a technical nature, like, what constraint to use for what bone, the overall bone hierarchy, where to use IK, which part of the mesh requires a bone and which doesn't, things like that. I guess i just don't have enough experience rigging, so it doesn't quite "click".

mogorodnik

Here's a more specific example i threw together in Blender. Just a simple see-saw, you pull the left down, right goes up, pull the right down, left goes up. How i would i go about rigging something like that? Is my mock-up close? In this example, one half of the top part copies the rotation of the other part and inverts it, thus making it look like a whole piece, and the side parts, being the children of the top two parts, go up and down accordingly. It somewhat works, but somehow looks hacky and wrong to me, but i'm not sure how else to go about it.

poopipe

assuming the object will be playing back canned animation don't animate the game/export rig directly.  

use the minimum number of bones required to support the articulation (probably 4 in this case) and bind them to a proper animation rig that has all the constraints and controllers you need on it.