Maya Q; noob having trouble with dynamic animation

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DunM@

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 2, 2002
Messages
316
So my goal is to build a Lego V8 in Maya then animate it to actually turn. After watching the "Intro to Maya" VTMs on the UT2k4 bonus disk I feel like I can handle it, but apparently one can't just watch 6 hours of movies and expect to be an expert :( . My first (and only so far) try was to set the crankshaft and cylinder heads as Passive Rigid Bodies and the rods (car people please don't flame me, I'm well aware that this isn't a rod, but I don't know what to call it) and pistons as Active Rigid Bodies, then keyframe the crankshaft to spin to make everything move.

I got it built and clicked play and it ate all my available RAM, maxed out my proc, and ultimately crashed maya (assuming that if I had told it to quit it would have asked me to save). The next time I tried it with just the crankshaft and a rod and it went a little faster... for the first two frames. By the third frame it had somehow moved the rod (which normally encircles part of the crankshaft (remember, this is Legos)) through the crankshaft and rotated it on an axis that there was no motion (of anything) on. Then it maxed out my processor again (but not RAM because I had many fewer Tris).

www.dunmatt.com/files/parts.zip contains all of the models I'm trying to use if you'd like to try for yourself (tip: set the scale to .05 and rotateZ to -90 for best results).

So my questions are; what went wrong? If that's not what dynamic animation is for, what should I use (ie MEL with lots of math or skeletons or bajillions of keyframes)?
 
You don't really need to keyframe much stuff just make the crankshaft rotate between the first and last frames (4 times 90 degree angle), since your doing dynamics make sure you bind the piston rods to only move on the y, x coordinate since they don't need z, piston should only move up and down (y axis). Maya is prolly panicking because it has to many variables to handle, try your engine with one cylinder. Not sure if that helps, I don't realy do dynamics mostly modeling and such.
 
I only keyframe the first and last frames, setting the rotateY to 360 and it works fine... just until I attach a rod (which isn't, but normally would be, connected to a piston which would move inside the engine block) at which point it goes nuts. I strongly suspect that you're right, that it's just too many polys, but it may also have to do with too many colisions per frame (because of the encirclement).

So what would be the right way to animate these parts?
 
You should be keyframing this animation... you move the object in question and hit "s"
to set a key... you'll kill yourself trying to animate an engine with maya's built in dynamics... its not meant to be used like that. Now you can use mel scripts to automate some taks but it sounds like your just getting started in maya... once you set a key if its repeatable you can set the key to repeat infinately... so only have to key it once. You should be staring out more simply than trying to animate an engine... start with a ball bounce...like everyone else :
good luck
 
The problem with the bajillions of keyframes approach is that there are alot of significant points through the rotation of the V8, it would take a long time. Would skeletons/joints work?
 
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