Help needed for animating Telescopic Arm

Meph

For ease of reference I provide the link of my current WIP with which I'm havi the current problem.
The core of the problem is integrating a Spline IK solver with the telescopic functionality of the pistons so i can simply grab the head of the crane an position it easily for posing and animation purposes

http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/3d-wips/6823-yet-unnamed-cruise-ship-2.html#post124092

[Deleted User]

Is there any particular reason you need to use spline IK? Usually that is used for flexible objects like snakes, hoses, and tentacles etc. It looks like your docking tube extends only along one axis and is rigid. But you mention a crane in this thread, so maybe I am looking at the wrong thing.

For something like the docking tube I would skip IK completely and just use position constraints to get the telescoping and use a dummy object to get the IK target functionality.

Nice WIP by the way. I always like to see original non-military ships being modeled.

Meph

No particualr reason for the spline IK, it just seemed the quickest way to set it up with easy axis contraints.

To be honest I haven't much experience with manual constraints and dummy IK targets.

Yup, you're right, teh telescopic funtionality is just for one axis, to extend the arms. for the rest the crane arms themselves have only one axes but the original idea was to integrade rotatable joints (the double discs you see at the end of each piston) but as mentioned this only a small secundary problem.

I would greatly appreciate some concrete help to set this up properly

[Deleted User]

Oops. I was looking at the wrong thing after all. I was looking at the docking connector on the page you linked to in your original post. Now I realize you are talking about the cargo arm on a later page.

Disregard my previous post. You are going to want to use HD IK for the sliding parts of that arm. If I have time today at work I'll see if I can do a quick tutorial on setting it up.

Meph

Well, I'ms till struggling to get it exactly right so any help is still welcome, In the meanwhile I made the cargo grappler itself (the 'hand' of the arm so to speak) and that was no problem to put the motions on sliders, but the arm is giving me headaches

efritsch

Sorry ask a question, but how did you do that hollow hose looking thing on page 5? The part that looks like an aircraft boarding ramp/dock.

Meph

No prob. The entire ship is made through box-modeling. Basically I extruded one poly upwards to create the middle section. Using a combination of extrude, bevel and inset I created the boarding tunnels from two sides of the central section. using camfer I created the rounded edges. Basically extruding outwards, 'insetting' the end polygon and re-extruding it inwards to create the hollow of the tunnel. The rubber-like joints (like between the two sections of an extended bus) I created by slicing a section and shrinking every alternate ring. the end section with the doors is basically a detached part of it. the doors were also created by slicing and beveling. The round windows were done by boolean/imprinting a cylinder several times and also beveling them inwards.

That's the general workflow, if you need some more specific help, feel free to ask