Maya : Rigging suspension geometry
polycounter lvl 11
Hi guys ! I am fairly new to rigging and I have been breaking my teeth trying to find a solution to rig a double wishbone suspension system inside of Maya for a while now, and i can't seem to find a solution online for this so far.
Basically, the system is composed of the car's chassis (mesh), one upper wishbone (white), one lower wishbone (red) , one toe link (purple) and a knuckle (green). Each locator is supposed to be a rotation point (just for the sake of illustrating here), ane each part is supposed to be rigid.
What i am trying to do is to be able to move the chassis up & down and have the suspension links moving in regards to the chassis movement, or to be able to move the knuckle up & down and having the rest of the suspension following. Just like a real car. The aim here is not to have something that is used to animate but to analyze the movements of the suspension geometry itself and thus, the result on the tire angle relative to the ground. So it would be great if it was possible to simply move the locators to a certain position to adjust the geometry and have everything adapting.
The best results i had so far was to have bones going trough 2 > 1 > 4 with an IK between 2 & 4. But then i had distance variations between 3 & 1. So i tried to constrain the pole vector to a locator parented to the 1 point of the bone, but since this point was driven by the pole vector itself, it was just acting weird. I didnt even try to include the toe link yet.
This thing realy is a puzzle for me that i can't seem to solve. Your help would be greatly appreciated !
Basically, the system is composed of the car's chassis (mesh), one upper wishbone (white), one lower wishbone (red) , one toe link (purple) and a knuckle (green). Each locator is supposed to be a rotation point (just for the sake of illustrating here), ane each part is supposed to be rigid.
What i am trying to do is to be able to move the chassis up & down and have the suspension links moving in regards to the chassis movement, or to be able to move the knuckle up & down and having the rest of the suspension following. Just like a real car. The aim here is not to have something that is used to animate but to analyze the movements of the suspension geometry itself and thus, the result on the tire angle relative to the ground. So it would be great if it was possible to simply move the locators to a certain position to adjust the geometry and have everything adapting.
The best results i had so far was to have bones going trough 2 > 1 > 4 with an IK between 2 & 4. But then i had distance variations between 3 & 1. So i tried to constrain the pole vector to a locator parented to the 1 point of the bone, but since this point was driven by the pole vector itself, it was just acting weird. I didnt even try to include the toe link yet.
This thing realy is a puzzle for me that i can't seem to solve. Your help would be greatly appreciated !
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