Thanks. Yup this BlenderMania guy is a bit much to listen to but he is showing a method to do what I want to do. But the Blender learning curve is quite a lot to contemplate. I’m hoping I can manage this in some workable form in SketchUp.
I understand using follow me to draw the spring. But I don’t get how you animated it.
Hmm could not say for sure, the plugin is probably superior, manual mesh adjustment per frame can get fiddly.
Without Photoshop it would be a pain to composite. See how you get on with the animation plugin, if you want post the model here up PM it to me and then I can see if I have time to help you tomorrow.
Did you animate scaling the helix and use the follow me tool for every frame to avoid distorting the cross section? The spring doesn’t look distorted in your animation.
Thanks TDahl. Good news that the extension does non-constant rates. And thanks for the link to the extension.
I don’t mind the Animator learning curve but Blender is a bit much.
By the way, your viking sampler project is impressive. Was the purpose to document legacy space technology?
Great thanks.
I have a draft model with a relaxed (longer) form of the spring and a compressed form.
However I’m not able to upload due to size. Is there a workaround? Sorry I’m a SU newbie.
I’m wondering the same. However it’s moving a bit fast so maybe it’s just hard to see the distortion. I think maybe I see it… ?
Regarding my video linked above (which uses springs in some very brief sequences), yes I’m trying to document and preserve the Viking legacy. The Viking '75 Mars project is my personal passion. I was in high school during the landings and recall watching the live TV feed of the first picture. I’ve been interested in the space program since the 1960s; Viking and Apollo are the two programs of most interest to me. For the past six or so years I’ve been researching Viking fairly seriously, including time spent at various museums doing detail photography and taking measurements of remaining hardware (~3500 photos and ~1500 individual measurements), all of which are available in public web albums. For about four years I’ve been creating a detailed high-fidelity SketchUp model of the lander (also available publicly). It’s probably half done or so. 
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mine was basically 3 components and 4 scenes…
short >> mid >> long >> mid then back to start…
I can’t find the original test so this is the basic card from the second video…
i didn’t need solids so I lightened the geometry…
have a play if you want…
Miga1_3CardPositions_free_camera.skp.zip (2.3 MB)
john
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Awesome!
The two gizmos you showed look amazing… but what are they for??
8 years ago I answered someone else with this reply…
The idea was intended as a filament feed mechanism for the RepRap 3D printer, I had seen on the forum that this was an area that the current solutions were a potential bottleneck for future developments.
I had recently discovered MigaMotors and wanted to explore potential application for ‘off the shelf’ products.
And , I was teaching myself Sketchup to see if I could get it to produce precise engineering models or not.
With this particular design it was intended to be 3D printed and have multiple units at intervals along a feed run.
It was also recognised that by having them back to back would result in a positioning system with zero backlash and no gearing.
The RepRap community seemed underwhelmed (happily using second hand stepper motors) so I sent the movie to Miga who contacted me immediately and have been extremely helpful in assisting me with a few other ideas I have for this technology.
I 'm working on a rotary motor (for bicycle human power assist) amongst other things, and although theoretically I have found a novel solution, the SMA’s inherent inefficiencies more than likely rule it out for a earth bound, battery powered mobile device.
A 240W 250grm 60-200RPM motor must have an application somewhere so it’s still on the back burner.
the ‘miga motor’ is the size of a credit card and uses memory wire…
john
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Can’t claim to understand all of this but sounds super interesting.
Multiple units of what…wire?
Thanks to the helpful people on this forum I’ve manage to get my spring to animate with some reasonable acceleration or deceleration using Fredo6’s Animation extension.
Now I’m trying to do something that should be simpler. I just want to move a sphere from one point to other.
I need to move the sphere at the left to coincide with the the sphere on the right side (attached to the spring).
I’ve tried doing a translation making sure that the start and end points look correct. But it never quite lines up. And I don’t see a way to tweak the path.
Then I tried setting up a path but I just don’t see how to put in the trajectory. I’ve tried a bunch of times. I’ve looked at tutorials online but Fredo6’s tutorial on paths doesn’t show how to put the trajectories in. Also, he’s using an earlier version of Animator (beta?).
I’ve done quite a bit of searching for more info online to no avail.
Any suggestions?
It should be fairly easy to do a translation operation with Animator. If the moving object does not end up where you want, then the target end coordinate must not be defined to be where you expect.
It is possible to edit an existing translation operation (in other words, you don’t have to delete the translation operation and create a new one). I don’t have access to check the Animator UI right now, but when you have selected the translation operation in the timeline and are looking at the operation’s “dialog box”, one of those buttons lets you change the motion. I think it would be the button that represents a translation operation (in other words, the same icon that you would have clicked to create the translation [vs. a rotation or etc.] initially). When clicked, the Animator UI will switch into an edit mode for the motion. I think in that mode hovering the mouse over objects that already have motion applied to them will show them in red. At that point you’ll have to experiment with how to re-define the object’s motion, I just don’t recall (sorry) but I did it very many times when preparing the long video I linked in an earlier reply. Or check the SketchUcation topic on Animator discussion for tips.
A common problem I had with Animator involved selecting and manipulating objects, in almost any context of the Animator UI, with a complex model. My model had hundreds of thousands to perhaps a couple of million edges and faces. Animator really runs slowly in some situations with a complex model, causing huge and confusing/irritating lag in the UI. Fredo made a major increase in performance a few months ago, based on one of my sample models, but there are still troubles. Selecting objects can be slightly troublesome, but worse is defining the parameters of a rotation or translation - that seems much slower in the Animator UI than simple object selection (which usually behaves with good to fair performance). If your model is relatively simple then this should not be a concern.
Edited to add a comment about path-based motion. I experimented with it a little, and I think used it in one place in my video, but overall found it very hard/finicky to get the behavior I wanted. Thus, I just used the simple straight-line translation for almost every move.
Thanks TDahl.
I was able to solve the problem by realigning my objects on an axis. Translation seems to align to axes so after aligning the objects on the axis the end point coincides to what I need. I’ll also try the hovering trick to see if I can get that to work.
But then my original spring compression somehow disappeared in the process! The Clips are still on the timeline but it doesn’t function. Fortunately the auto backup file of SU still has the spring animation intact. So I should be able to put the pieces together.
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