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FSXA Scissor Gear Animation Tutorial

delivery guy

delivery guy

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Scissor gear animation tutorial using IK Limb Solver and LookAT Constraint.

Post if this helped you since it's hard to find a good tutorial that makes it easy to understand. And i was not able to find any tutorials on scissor gear when i did a google search. So i thought i would make a very easy tutorial that you can learn in minutes.

Update: This is part 1 and part 2 is further down on this thread.
 
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hairyspin

hairyspin

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Nice work DG, but that won't work in FS until the animations are collapsed to keyframes. A little more video work to add...
 
delivery guy

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I am making a part 2 video on how to convert to key frames. I have tried in the past to use curve editor / controller collapse. But it only creates key frames with no position for each key.
So i use another method using the align tool to set each key frame and use the parts from the first video and the position i need for the new parts.

If someone wants to make a tutorial on how to use controller collapse and actually have moving animated parts it would be helpful. Although this method is pretty quick and works good.
 
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hairyspin

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Go to the Animation panel, Trajectories tab, you'll find the Collapse button. For each object with a constrained (eg Look At) animation, specify start & end time and number of samples, select rotation and/or position keys and click Collapse.

Collapse_zpsdrjvbrpn.jpg



Done, and even quicker.
 
delivery guy

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Yes very quick and i like this. Somehow when i searched controller collapse i got instructions for the curve editor / controller collapse which looks the same but does not work. And was never able to get the new animation keys to work.
But with this it works excellent. And i am surprised i never noticed this tab. Thanks hairyspin.

I noticed this works great with the lookat constraint. But for the IK limb solver i had to do a few extra steps. Not sure i can get around this.

This is much better!
 
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antaris

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Hello lads

First of all, I don't want to hijack this thread or disrupt it's original goal. So, I will ask.
Since I have some questions in this precise topic, should I create a new thread?

In advance, thank you and congratulations for the great tutorials.
Sergio.
 
tgibson

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If your questions do not directly relate to the tutorial itself, start another thread and refer back to this tutorial if needed by using a link.
 
euroastar350

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Hi guys,

Sorry for replying to a year old thread, but I can't seem to get my head wrapped around limb solver and lookat constraint animations. Seen the video numerous times, but I fail at getting the limb solver to work at all in max 9 and 2012, although I use max 9 for my development work. Of course the parts in question are the gear scissors. I've done the old style animations, but look very out of place in max and within FSX. Can someone give me an insight on which part(s) needs to be connected (animated/non-animated) or step by step on getting this work? This is for my Trislander project, so any help is really much appreciated.
 
ErickC

ErickC

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One cool thing I noticed about collapsing keyframes is that it can be done to anything that is animated, whether it's animated with look-at constraints or not. This may be helpful when converting a rotating part to FSX - you could very quickly insert the required key per 90 degrees this way. Let's say you have a flap drive screw that completes 80 turns in however many frames on an FS9 model, with a key per 360-degree rotation. Upon conversion to FSX, you could go to the trajectories tab, set an appropriate animation length, then set the number of keys to 321 (4 * 80 + 1), hit "collapse," and be done with it.
 
hairyspin

hairyspin

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Quite correct, and handy for making sure FSX elevators, rudder, wheels etc have enough keyframes to work properly in the sim.
 
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