Is there a quick tutorial available on how to go about animating a multi-part landing gear? I've searched the WWW but to no avail.Making the boggy follow the strut etc isn't very hard, I have that figured out.What I want to do now is to create a hinged model of a landing gear with e g the gear strut and a two-part dragbrace and have the strut rotate in around it's pivot point as I rotate the upper dragbrace to it's retracted position.Cheers, Fred

I couldn't find one when I did the animation for the "Mallard". In the end I managed to do most of it with child / parent relationships. In the gear for that there are 3 parts that animate seperately.(Sorry if the technical terms are incorrect). There is a hinged strut that rotates and pushes the gear from the side of the Aircraft (1) and a two part vertical (when deployed) section that hinges in the middle - the wheel being attached to the bottom section (2) and the top section being attached to the wing (3) (you might just be able to make it out from my sig).I set up the relationships as follows:Wheel child of (2)(2) child of (1)(3) no parentThe pivot point of (2) is set at the intersection of (1) and (2).Firstly I rotated (1) since that actually positions the undercarriage, and put in the start & end rotations for (2) and (3). This gives a good start & end for the gear motion - after that I inserted key frames for (2) and (3) every 10 frames or so and corrected the rotation so that the ends of (2) & (3) stayed together.Don't know if that helps (I have read it back and I am struggling) although if you have a look at Greg Pepper's Albatross - all of the main parts are the same. If you need anything confirming give me a shout !!!

http://www.freeflightdesign.com/tutorials.html

wsieffert,been there, but didn't see any tutorials covering animation beyond the basics... did I miss one?Cheers, Fred

I did look there as well, but it only gave a basic overview of how to do it.. ..I ended up messing around with GMAX until I finally managed to get it to do what I wanted ... ...

http://thegreatptmd.tripod.com/lg_tut_frame.htmRegards,Bob