Hi,

I tried to build a mechanism with few joints. The problem is that I don't want to control all my joints but let Houdini calculates angles and speeds when I control just a one point myself. I think the attached picture explains my situation better. So i just want to control joint 4. angle and joint 5. angle and position and let Houdini calculates how joint 1 2 3 behaves.

Looks that Bones do something like this but i never has used it. Is there some other way? Bones looks pretty complicated and not so mechanical way to do this?

Thx
Mika

Doing this with bones is fairly simple, but if you have no knowledge on how to use bones, that´s another issue. You don´t need bones in this case, you could just copy a parameter from one control and paste relative to the other controls.

Angel Fucaraccio
Doing this with bones is fairly simple, but if you have no knowledge on how to use bones, that´s another issue. You don´t need bones in this case, you could just copy a parameter from one control and paste relative to the other controls.

Hi,

Thanks for the answer. I need to animate movement and if i want to constant movement for the last joint, the control formulas will be very complicated for the rest of joints.

I tried the bones and i think only problem what i had, I could not figured out how to lock degrees of freedoms from joints what i dont want control myself. For example joint 2 and 3 has just one degrees of freedom.

Honestly, if you just parent those geometries and block the channels you don´t want to animate would be more than enough.

Angel Fucaraccio
Honestly, if you just parent those geometries and block the channels you don´t want to animate would be more than enough.

Using the bones I was able to build something simple what i want. I have to say that i tried many different parenting trick but i could not create the same result than with the bones.