Help with a hinge type thing

Proxzee

Do you guys know I can get this to happen:

its a mechanical hinge type thing, and I was trying to do it with constraints then with bones, but nothing works.

When I parent, rotating the child makes the child morph

When I use hard bind, i get an error: must contain CV or Vertex.

Kawe

Parenting should do the trick. How are you parenting this?

MoP

Sounds like you've been non-uniform scaling your objects. Do a Reset XForm on them all before rigging them up. Parenting and constraining should work fine.

System

You don't need bones, adjust the pivots to the end of each section/beginning of next and link the child through to the parent.

If you want to do a complex anim though here's a nice tut. http://www.3dnuts.com/tutorials/model_chain.shtml
Edit - Scaled that down a bit!

MoP

GCMP: He already did that (like he said in his post), just the child objects were scaling and squashing when rotating. This is due to not resetting XForms before linking the objects.

System

Ahh xform, ok, I thought maybe there was a linking/pivot problem and just wanted to illustrate it clearly.

Proxzee

BOH! That's what's been wrong with my maya. I needed to reset xforms

Mark Dygert

If you still have scale/rotate issues after reset xform, link each one to a dummy object and animate the dummies. You can also go into the curve editor and play with the curves to fix the issue, but really, its much more stable if you just create bones, skin/skinwrap each object to its bone and go from there.

This issue you're running into is pretty common when you animate objects themselves.

Proxzee

Thanks for the help everyone!

Incidently does freezing transformations get rid of that Hard bind error where I can't bind skin to to bone with hard bind?