Robotic Arm Rigging in 3Ds Max

Hi Tech Artists,

I’m having issues with trying to rig a robotic arm. I want to stop any sort of rotations on the X and Z axis but I seem to be having no luck. I’ve setup a simple HI solver and tried snapping the bones to dummies so that they match the picot point of the arm chunks.

I’ve also tried playing around with locking some of the axis in the link info.


Should I be disabling the axis in the curve editor instead? Or is it not possible to have the ease of movement that I’m looking for with the simple constraints?

Thanks in advance!

Create a point/dummy that you will position constrain the ik effector to. Then use an orientation constraint on the head of the robotic arm, and assign it the previously created point/dummy as a target.

To animate, use the point/dummy and apply any locks or other restrictions to this.

Here’s a quick example. robotic_arm_2012.zip (27.1 KB)