Articulated Joints

[JohnathanMacBride]

I am working on a project that requires articulated movement of objects in a link set. I am not 100% sure how to do this, but the idea is similar to animating a robotic arm. each joint moves within a defined range of motion. I am thinking I will have to animate a set of linksets to make it work but I am not sure how to do it.

Here is a video of an actual sentry turret, I am trying to simulate tracking of 3 joints

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UPDATE

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Here is an illustration of what needs to move:

[arton Rotaru]

That's most of all a scripting task rather than building. If this is mesh, you want to position the pivot points of each piece where you need it, to make scripting easier. Unfortunately SL set the pivot point always at the center of the meshes bounding box . You will have to add invisible geometry to your meshes, to place the pivot points where you need them. This can be done with a single triangle, which vertices are placed along a line. This line won't render in-world.

To animate that you will have to set the rotations/positions of each moving child prim in the linkset on it's own, relative to the root prim, with llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast function calls. It can be quite a challenge to begin with.

[JohnathanMacBride]

I was afraid of that. It is a Prim build right now, so I may scrap the idea altogether.

[JohnathanMacBride]

So with what I am gathering it would take a considerable amount of math to make sure the position is correct for all articulated joints/objects in the turret?