Animation In Carrara 5

[Rowan]

Hi all, I'm trying to learn animation in carrara 5, and I want to apply it to a mechanical figure. All the animation I've managed to do so far has deformed the figure (see pics). I want to set up a series of joints for rotation etc etc (I tried to download the tripod .car file to see what I needed to do, but it can't be found). Anyone able to help?

[sadot]

1.-Check the position of the bones
2.-Assign the correct weights for each bone
3.-If you want you can use IK or simply animate one bone at a time

I made a little animation, download the file

[Rowan]

Weight? Where can I adjust that?

[Etienne Colas]

In modeling room -

[jawra]

hi
Generally for simple animation of mechanical devices you don't need any bone except for animating flexible parts like hose , rope , some wire or rubber things.
The only thing you should do is to group parts of your device from parent-object to last child-object just like bones (in carrara simply drag and drop child to parent-object) set or adjust HOT-POINT for every object (especially for rotated parts) and THEN apply constraits for movement.Now you can set position of parts for key-frames.
In zip-file 2 .car files with simple animations without bones and IK.
I hope you'll find it usefull.

[sadot]

Yep, thats another way, just remember to change the HotPoint of the objets

[Sardtok]

If you want to use bones for animating several parts like this, just setup your bone hierarchy, then place the different meshes under the bone which it is supposed to adjust to in the hierarchy...
Looking at what you've done I would guess you applied the skeleton to the group,
instead use the bones as a group and move the meshes called sweep and cut in under those bones in the hierarchy.