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Rigging A Tricycle
This project was all about rigging. Rigging is setting up bones and constraints to make a model move, animate or transform properly. There are many ways to rig a model but generaly you want the rig to be simple to operate, easy to understand, and able to find all the bones/keyshapes or parts of the model that are expected to be animated.
This screen shot shows the rig's controls. The controls are what make the rig easy to use. Plainly labled, one is for steering and one is for moving.
To move the tricycle, simply grab the rig marked "use to move", place it in the final position then set the keyframes and play (or you could use a path) You would notice that the wheels automaticly rotate as the model moves along the path. Now for steering, just rotate the "rotate to steer" ring. This ring will follow the other, can be moved out of the way, and handles all the steering. Also its Z rotation is the only axis it will rotate on. The entire rig will keep evolving. I have another idea for the rig and how I want it to work, but its gonna take some work to figure out how to make it.
This screen shot shows the rig's steering bones. These bones are doing most of the work. The big one you see there rotates the entire steering assembly, if you look a little closer you will se a bone that runs paraelle to the petals and a bone for each petal that is paraelle to the ground plane. Those bones are responsible for rotating the wheel when the model moves, and keeping the petals level with the ground as they petal around. That is improtant if you desired to put a character onto this model.
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