Practical Guide for Rigging Gears and Pistons in Cinema 4D

Ed Brown is set to aggressively right the wrongs of the c4d tutorial word by “cutting the crap” (i’m paraphrasing it down a bit). Ed hopes to provide straight up, to the point, and pragmatic tutorials for Cinema 4D. Ed will offer tutorials he calls “Pro Tips” that will be work and industry focused to give you what you need to get the job done. Sounds great! Oh, and by the way, there is a bit of cursing involved as well.

how you would calculate how fast gears should turn when they’re meshed, how you set up a constant speed variable to turn them, and how to set up a conrod and piston assemblyEd Brown – EdmundBrown.co.uk

Ed shows how to prep the gears by aligning all the rotation axis that will not only help with creating the Xpresso that will drive the motion, but also make it easier to follow what is happening in the animation. The Gears will use User Data in c4d as an interface for the Xpresso that will ultimately drive the rotations, and the pistons will use a parent hierarchy to make it all come together.

Keeping things simple, Ed Ed has a look at simplifying some of the maths needed to solve for the varying gear rotations that might interest you. For more tutorials like this one, Ed has started a Youtube Channel and is asking for your subscriptions so that you can stay up to date: Cinema 4D Pro Tips.

More on Rigging Gears in Cinema 4D

Of course we haven’t gone without the odd tutorial on this site that offered a look at using Xpresso to automate things, and in particular gear rotations and rotational relationships

One that shows how to use the Xpresso range mapper node in Using The Xpresso Range Mapper Node to Create & Animate Gears In Cinema 4D and another tutorial showing the drive / slave gear systems Driving a Master and Slave Gear System in Cinema 4D using Xpresso