Spring rig

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I am working on a spring rig with an armature. I am having a hard time parenting the spring to the housing it sits in. I also created a driver to control the spring when I compress the housing. I can get it to compress but it is too slow. To use this rig, just scale the center spring rig called piston.01

Spring anim3.blend (696 KB)

Can someone help explain what I am doing wrong?

2

The problem may be that your spring object has unapplied object-level scaling. Or it may be that your compressed shape key just isn’t compressed enough.

For a different approach, you might like to look at my series of spring tutorials.

Best wishes,
Matthew

3

Thanks MCollett,

I don’t have a problem with the blender shapes or rig when they are not controlled by a bone. It is when I try and get them to connect via a Bone have the problem. Your tutorial looks really helpful. I will have to go through it when I have some more time.

I think 100% of my problem is around the driver I am using to tie it to the bone. Here it is pulled out:
http://screencast.com/t/vvfkdCO0YVk0

Here it is with the piston fully down:
http://screencast.com/t/p5j0l6PPDMGf

I have to drop the piston below the bottom housing to get the spring to fully collapse. See:
http://screencast.com/t/1Tz2KtxsedPa

If I remove the driver then it works perfectly. but I have to animate the shape keys separately. Which I don’t want to do:
http://screencast.com/t/vZhftcEcedh

I am 99% sure my math is wrong or a setting is wrong with the driver. Any thoughts?