How do you guys animate airliner flaps on both sides ?

[Osian]

As the title says, how do you guys do it ?

I have been stuck at animating the flaps for 3 years now and have still not found a solution for "mirroring" the animations so I have smooth even animations.

The program I use is Blender.

I just need a general idea, as I am about to give up on developing all together...

 

[Heretic]

This is 3ds Max, but the basic principle is the same in every modeling tool. Animating the left flap with all its translation and rotation keyframes was the first step.
I then adjusted the right flap's pivot point to match the left one's position and orientation (same longitudinal and vertical position, negative lateral position; same rotation angle around the lateral axis, negative roation angle around both the horizontal and vertical axis).
After that, I copied the left flap's animation keyframes one by one to the right flap with lots and lots of copy-and-paste for translation and rotation data and occasional use of a calculator at certain angles, necessitated a subtraction from 180°.
It was tedious, but the only way to obtain an accurate and 100% matching result.

Control surfaces and flaps are good animation training.
Just wait till you have to do a landing gear with all its shock absorbers, downlocks and hydraulic cylinders for an ultimate nightmare.

 

[F747fly]

Heretic is right, albight it not being that hard most of the time it is very tedious. Blender also lets you create custom axis to rotate on (as I think Heretic is showing in his 3DS image there?) and I recommend using it and then having an offsetting defined axis for the other flap.

Just wait till you have to do a landing gear with all its shock absorbers, downlocks and hydraulic cylinders for an ultimate nightmare.

So true...

 

[hairyspin]

In Gmax and Max I would use Dummy objects and other Helpers to set up the pivots of the flaps. In Blender the equivalent seems to be Empty objects, but there my Blender knowledge runs out, sorry.

I rather enjoy complex animations....

 

[F747fly]

In Gmax and Max I would use Dummy objects and other Helpers to set up the pivots of the flaps. In Blender the equivalent seems to be Empty objects, but there my Blender knowledge runs out, sorry.

I rather enjoy complex animations....

I'm sorry but can you explain this more? I only really use empties for parts that are involved in multiple animations

 

[Heretic]

Blender also lets you create custom axis to rotate on (as I think Heretic is showing in his 3DS image there?) and I recommend using it and then having an offsetting defined axis for the other flap.

Basically yes. In 3ds Max/GMax, the origin comes with its own coordinate system.

And I think this article explains the concept for Blender, although I do not know if custom transform orientations are independently from any mesh features (edge, face), so that you can put them anywhere within or outside of the object.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/...t/editing/transform/control/orientations.html

 

[hairyspin]

As I said, my knowledge of Blender is minimal (and I have no reason to learn more), but that link Heretic supplied ought to give some ideas.

 

[F747fly]

they are as long as you tell blender it has to create a new one (so you can use normal and select a face or edge, create the custom orientation in the N-tab and select it in the orientation list).

 

[Zoren]

I would suggest checking out the below YouTube videos. The person doing the demo of Blender to FSX is on this site so you maybe able to ask him for some help. His videos have helped me out a lot with Blender and FSX.

https://www.youtube.com/user/kpgamemods

<-- demo on rotation of parts at odd angles...