Blender’s constraint system offers a very powerful feature-set. In this video tutorial we will look at how to rig a piston using several constraints.
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20 Comments
I love your tuts Jonathan, very nice, thanks for teaching us.
May I suggest that you add 30 secs at the early part of the constraining a piston tut to explain how to reset the object centers since that is crucial and lots of beginners have trouble with this.
Great tutorial! I’ve been following your tutorials for a while now and they’ve helped me immensely!
As well as the 30 second portion on resetting object centers, you might mention something about applying the visual rotation and scaling data (I think it is alt-a?) to the object as this can give odd results when you go set up the constraints, depending on how the assembly was modeled.
Thanks so much, these tutorials are priceless!
–Lace
It’s ctrl-akey, apologies. This seemed to solve some strange movement issues I was having with items I was constraining.
I am having trouble with objects following empties ,right after objects are repositioned from Constraints to face empty. I was wondering is this got to do with resetting object centers that Lyle Walsh was mentioning about ?
And , yes , thank you for your time ,and for the tutorial .
very enjoyable thanks!
hi,i,m a noob so i got a problem,at the end my pieces don’t stay into eachother,they track but still fly out of the piston,do i have the axes wrong?
It sounds like you just need to set a limit on the constraints so that the piston can only move a certain distance.
I’m assuming that resetting the object centers is a rather simple task. How is it done?
I’m having a little bit of trouble. I was very excited to find this tutorial, as it covers something I needed to learn in order to rig a piston model I’ve had for a while. I was never able to get around to animating it because the rigging, as you can imagine, was extremely complicated. This gives me that ability. There is a problem, though. Whenever I reset the axis so that the transformation that arises from applying the tracking constraint is undone, “AutoTrack” is immediately highlighted in red, and suddenly the tracking ceases to take place. I’ve gone through this portion of the tutorial several times, but each time I have the same problem. Are there any suggestions available that would enable me to fix this?
Is there a chance to scale the whole thing up/down without changing the proportions?
yeah looks like lego
Jonathon,
Is there a way to add several more cylinders inside of these, so that I can make a 4-section piston? I am currently working on rigging a boom for a crane, with square profiled segments and would like to have the entire assembly extend, raise/lower and rotate from where the bottom empty would be. I am having trouble making all the sections point to the base/bottom empty though. I have tried this with your system of empties and also with armatures (which I would prefer to use).
Any way to do this?
Thanks.
Hi Jonathon
Brilliant tutorial …. do you have links to more …. would love to see them
your commentary and methods of working are excellent ….
I made a few mistakes as I went along but learned a great deal from trying them out….
Thankyou for posting ,,,,,, by the way what did you use to record the tutorial
I would like to try one myself …..
You find a complete list of all my Blender Cookie tutorials here: http://www.blendercookie.com/tag/jonathan-williamson/
I also have several on CGTuts: http://cg.tutsplus.com/author/jonathan-williamson/
PacktPub: http://www.packtpub.com/article/character-head-modeling-in-blender-part1
Montagestudio: http://montagestudio.org/tutorials/
Oh and I use Camtasia Studio for all my recording.
Great …..
Thank you, very much for the quick response ….
I have started trying to create my own tutorial ….. its harder than it looks
but I shall continue trying ….. great work again and cheers for all the links
I will start to work through the rest of your tutorials ….. and hopefully
learn how to use blender ….
I tended in the past to take the models I create into Blender as 3ds files
from using Wings3d which I learned initially to quickly model objects up …
now that your demonstrations and tutorials have shown me some of the power of this
brilliant program I will start to use it more ……
23dornot23d ….
Nice tutorial but it doesn’t work for me
I’ve tried it many times and i don’t know what i do wrong. The most problems
occur while selecting the proper axis.
Finally…..After a few Hours and watching this tutorial many….maaaaaany times i figured it out
But i got a question Jonathan. It’s the same as a comment above. What i have to do when i insert more zylinders in my piston?! Is it more difficult?
Fantastic tutorial! It was very informative and easy to follow. Thanks for taking the time to create this.
Nice tutorial. I followed it and here’s what I got.
Using blender 2.5 alpha 2
[URL=http://tinypic.com/r/xq05d2/5]View My Video[/URL]
Awesome tutorial, Jonathan. I’m loving using Blender for mechanical parts.
Lyle and Lace, to set your object’s pivot, select your object, tap the Tab key to go into Edit Mode. Then position the 3d cursor (the life preserver thingy) where you want it to rotate from. This can be done by selecting 2 faces of different sides of the object, then Shift S and choose “Cursor To Selection”.
After you get it where you want it, tap the Tab key again and it seemed to do nothing. Press the Center Cursor button on the Editing Menu (F9).
This will set you up with a rotation and scaling point. If you can set it exactly without going into Edit mode then omit the first part.
If there’s an easier way to do it, someone please let me know, as I’m still learning too.
~G