Hi guys!
First of all – sorry for my basic question 
I’ve used blender mostly for modeling and simple animation.
Now I need some more advanced rig and I’m lost in big world of armatures / constrains.
What I’m trying to achieve is simple animation of telescopic antena / leg.
I want to animate whole antenna of n parts with one controller. This is what I have.
I dont know how to connect 3rd (and any next…) part to the system.
BR.
Here’s one possible answer - find bone “ram1.001” and scale it to see the telescopic cylinders working… Or just press PLAY.
Cheers.
Let me know if you need any more advice on how it works. This is from a large project of mine but it runs standalone.
telescopic.blend (1.58 MB)
I forgot to set render engine to Cycles. sorry!
Here’s the WIP project:
Hi!
Thanks a lot – your solution is great,
but I don’t know how you connected ‘piston-chrome’ object to piston vertical bones…
Hi!
If you mean the “ram-piston” bones, which I think you do, I parented the “piston-chrome” object to the armature using the “With Empty Groups” option, then selected the required vertices in Edit Mode and assigned them using the assign button under the “Vertex Groups” pane. I must admit that it took some time to discover that you do not have to use “Automatic Weights” parenting all the time. For mechanical objects, empty groups option is often a better solution IMHP. Just select the vertices you want assigned, select the bone from the list and click “Assign”. This also means that you can have all the piston components in one object and just assign bits of the object to different bones.
Hope this helps you.
Thanks!
Works as a charm.
