[Uriel]

I'm going out of my mind here! I've been trying to get this working for hours and I just can't.

I've modelled a crankshaft, connecting rod and piston. Now I want to animate them, but I'm having real trouble. First I tried with a bone that was parented to the crank with the piston set as the target. With this setup the bone worked exactly the way I wanted the rod to work, but I could not for the life of me get the rod to move in the same way as the bone.

Then I looked in the classic content folderand found the IK piston sample. I've tried to recreate this setup with a null for the crank pivot, rod pivot and one for the position for the piston end of the rod, but I still can't get it to work. the rod just stays pointing out from the crank making big circles. I'm getting the same thing I get if I turn off the Enable IK option on the sample scene. But it's turned on and I can't find what's different with mine.

Does anyone have any ideas or links to a tutorial that goes through setting up something similar. I've found several tutorials (including the ones on this site), but they all use bones and skelegons. Looking at this sample scene it can all be done with nulls.

Please, please somebody put me out of my misery!

[colto]

I would have to look at your set up to try and fix the problem here. If you want, you could email me the model at: coltmc@charter.net and I would be happy to set up the IK for you and give a short tutorial on how I did it.

[Uriel]

Well, with a lot of help from Colto I've managed to do it. It seems that I had the rods oriented wrongly for the targetting to work correctly.

If anyone is interested you can see all the parts working correctly here. Now I just need to model the rest of the engine and do the surfacing