Animating a Catapult
As an exercise in animating a system of parts of a model, before you continue to animate the locomotive in the next chapter, you’ll now animate a catapult. This catapult model is straightforward to animate. You’ll turn its winch to bend back the catapult arm, which shoots the projectiles, and then you’ll fire and watch the arm fly up.
First, let’s get acquainted with the scene file and make sure its pivots and hierarchies are set up properly. The scene file catapult_anim_v1.mb in the Catapult_Anim project on the CD has everything in order, although it’s always good to make sure. Figure 8-46 shows the catapult with its winch selected and ready to animate.
Figure 8-46: The catapult’s winch is ready to animate.
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