Ok, I’ve created an oval type track that runs over bogey wheels for a model that can’t use the normal method of adding drivers to rotate mesh around a curve. My track must have bones in order to move with the model in the program I intend to use it in. The program does not have physics so I have to animate the track and import the animation with the model.
Anyway. What I’ve done here is created a NurbsCircle and shaped that to the path the track must follow.
The track has 51 pads (and I have to do this for 4 tracks) So I created an object that includes an armature, a bone, an empty and the pad mesh. I set the empty to a follow path constraint, made the bone a child of the empty, then weighted the pad to the bone. I then create 50 duplicates of the object and offset them around the circle to form the track. This results in 51 armatures rotating around the circle.
It works exactly the way I need it to work.
My problem now is that I need connect this of another armature that drives the body of the model by either joining the 51 armatures into 1 armature and retain the positioning on the nurbscircle and the animation, or create an animation that will drive the bones around the circle retaining there position through the animation. I also have to set all the origin points to center.
I’ve attempted to do both, but I’m totally lost. W
hen I join the armatures, the bones fly off to points unknown, the pads follow. the empties stay on the circle but the whole animation is a mess.
I’ve tried to create an action animation by inserting keystrokes for each bone for the 200 frames required to complete a rotation but when I remove the constraints the bone object fall back to their original creation position and the animation does nothing.
It starting to look like I’m going to have to go through an manually create an action animation based on normal bones by moving and positioning them like a stop frame animation.
Any Advice???