Rotating Gear Cogs in 3ds Max - gfx elite forums

Marta · #1 (**permalink**) October 3, 2006, 19:11

Right so I've drawn two gears - so far so good. One has 24 teeth, and the other has twelve teeth and is a different size. Now I know I could calculate how far one would turn the other when rotated using mathematics.

But can I do this using I2k or something similar? Supposing I have 20 gears all different sizes and numbers of teeth? And dotted about all over the place with the teeth intermingling.

I've seen the loco tutorial where they use point helpers and do some trig etc but that's waaay too complicated for me!

Is there no really easy way that if I turn one gear it turns the others just by the teeth in the mesh "meshing" against one another? And at the correct speed for the number of teeth and orientation?

This has been drivin' me nuts!

If not, why not? It seems an obvious thing Autodesk might have included, or am I missing something?

viettmann · #2 (**permalink**) October 3, 2006, 19:44

Never had such a problem, but i'll look at this problem tommorow - maybe i'll figure it out.

fishly · #3 (**permalink**) October 3, 2006, 19:56

Hi Marta and viettmann =)

I found this thread discussing the very issue:
[3DS MAX] Animating Gears

Code:

http://www.threedy.com/site/forum/showthread.php?t=32613

Apart from this I'm not much of help since most code makes my lil brain scream from terror :o

Hope this can be of some help =)

Marta · #4 (**permalink**) October 3, 2006, 20:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by starry

Hope this can be of some help =)

I have added to your reputation. Brilliant!!!

Novnia · #5 (**permalink**) December 8, 2006, 07:35

rotate one cog so that the tooth moves one spot over, and rotate the NEXT cog so that the that tooth moved one spot.

When you play it and loop the animations it should look like the cog did a small turn and the teeth are working.

Go to the curve editor, select the keyframs on both cogs, and click relative repeat ->

Now the cogs will rotate and fuction. do this for each cog and your machine will work. Total time per cog if yo uknow what your doing shouldnt be more than 30 seconds. 60 tops.

Occams Razor people. The simplest solution is typicaly the best.