animating the robot
 

Hello i have been modelling this robot for 2 weeks


http://i158.photobucket.com/albums/t...orumpic1-2.jpg


its not my design i got the reference stuff from here
Dust Game

but i am having trouble animating it and wanted to know if with the joints can you bind one joint in a skeleton to one piece of geometry?


http://i158.photobucket.com/albums/t...orumpic2-1.jpg

here are the five separate peices of geo that can move atm i can key frame it all but surely it would be better rigged up?

any suggestions would be amazing!
or if im going about it completely wrong please tell me!

Check the tutorials that go with Maya.
I remember a long time ago that there was one for mechanical rigging.
It was really easy and fun.

binding? on a mechanical model?
no point, nothing needs to deform

just build your skeleton and parent your objects to the relevant bones

like jm said, there's a tutorial that comes with maya that involves rigging a mechanical arm, it's a good tutorial, you should check it out :)

i cant find the tut?!

i clicked on the tuts froim the drop down menu and the firefox says it cant find it?!

then your installation is broken and imcomplete?

if you couldn't find it from clicking help > tutorials then try navigating your computer

i assume you're using windows
C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2009\docs\Maya2009\en_US

where Maya2009 is the version of maya you're using

then open index.html

click learning resources (on the left frame)
click tutorials
click getting started with maya
click animation
click lesson 5: Inverse Kinematics

if you still can find it for whatever reason (like your using a mac and that address isn't going to relevant to you)
then google "maya help documentation"
it's the first link that comes up

thats amazing!thank you so much!