Piston Rigging

Ian Hubert

Ah, that's a great idea! I think I actually have a playlist on my channel with every tut I've done on it, but I haven't updated it lately. I should make that more easily accessible.

Rather than use a Word Doc for the links, I just created a custom private playlist on YouTube itself. When you watch the video on youTube there is a Save link in the area where the Like and Dislike buttons are. There you can create a new private playlist and add new videos to it. That way you can always come back to any video without having the log into Patreon.

Kai Christensen

As someone who has spent hours rigging pistons... Yes. They suck. Way I used to do it was by having a pivot empty and an anchor empty for each end of the piston, then parent the pivots to the anchors and have each pivot point towards the corresponding opposite anchor (that way it wasn't a direct dependency loop) but man was it irritating to set up and animate. Haven't watched the video yet but i'm sure you've come up with something cool. EDIT: Oh wow looks like i should have watched before commenting, thought i was SO original lol.

martin åberg

hey thank you, I did manage to work it out by doing something like that. Awesome, now I can watch stuff from the comfort of my couch!

Carter Burr-Kirven

They're all unlisted (since they're just for patrons), so you have to at least come here to get the link! You can always click through to watch the videos on YouTube, or, I dunno, paste the links into a Word document so you can watch any of them anytime without coming back to Patreon? But yeah, the bottleneck has to be through here—that's the tradeoff with the whole concept of exclusive content. Mobile is especially tricky, I end up clicking the link in Patreon and going through to YouTube, opening that link in my mobile browser, watching a few seconds to get the video in my watch history, and then going over to the YouTube app to actually watch the video at my usual 1.5 or 2x. It's not ideal, haha. Desktop is easy, though, just click through!

martin åberg

Hi! Im new to Patreon, love Ians stuff (hi Ian!) this is maybe not the place and not a question to Ian but google takes me nowhere, so: Can I watch these videos on youtube? I mean, the patreon videos, or do you always have to go through patreon in order to see them? thanks alot!

Greg DiGenti

Great tip! Wow, saves a LOT of mode switching!

Brent Holzheimer

Hahaha, I was trying to do this last night. And every time I did it, it would bend in the middle. So moral of my story. Thank you again Ian.

Pete Burges

One thing I've often been taught is that a golden rule with rigging is to use dummy objects (empties) to do all the heavy lifting; so you could have an empty at the end of each piston (lined up with the piston's origin point), and then parent the piston (or location constrain) to it's empty and have each piston (or better yet, a bone that controls the piston) track to the other one's empty. That gets rid of the circular dependecy, but I'm not sure that it's any more elegant or efficient than just using an IK chain. In the end, you have to use whichever setup seems more stable.

My pleasure, it's under edit in the top left

Mark Miller

Man, IK piston is way easier than the damped track nonsense I've been doing. Thanks for this

Mark Miller

Where is this fabled "lock object mode"?

Michael Steinheiser

That would be super helpful!

Ian Hubert

AHHH!! Yes! Hot damn yes that's going to save me about a million keystrokes, thanks a ton for that! :D

Ian Hubert

AH! Somebody was mentioning that with my last post, too (maybe you?)- let me try that right now.

When parenting objects to bones, if you turn off lock object mode, you don't have to toggle between object mode and pose mode quite as much -- when you select the object it automatically changes to object mode, when you select the bone (if it was in pose mode last time it was selected) then it automatically changes to pose mode

Doug Brown

That would be great! Thanks! Just remember to rest... :) it must be 1.30am over there. ;) Sleep is good... ;)

Ian Hubert

Oh! That's good to know- I'm never sure if I'm going to fast with certain stuff, or beating a dead horse. I think I need to actually do what I was talking about, and make specific videos for each thing (like rigging IK, or parenting objects to rigs), so I can actually explain them in a specific video that I can just reference, instead of half-explaining it every time I do it.

Doug Brown

Awesome thanks Ian... I think I'll need to watch this... and the other IK vids a few more times before the penny drops. :)