Any suggestions for animating a chainsaw?

So I'm wanting to animate a chainsaw bayonet on an assault rifle.

Sort of like the Lancer from Gears, but different in mechanics.

I'm fairly novice at Blender, especially animating, but I'm fairly certain that what I'm needing to do is animate a series of teeth along a path and loop it.

I'd make one set of animations when its idol and rotating slowly, then another animation for when it's going full speed, and blend between the two and increasing the animation speed.

And of course adding smoke, sound, blood, camera shake, etc...

But right now that's as far as I can figure out.

Any potential tutorials that can help me out from here?

 

I don't have any specific tutorials, but I know there are tutorials about animating tank treads. The treads would probably be animated quite similarly to the chainsaw you are trying to do.

And yes, it would very possibly be done with a series of bones on a path that move in sequence. I'm betting there is some trickery in Blender that could be done to automate that as well but I don't have the exact method on the top of my head.

 

TANK TREADS!!!

You are a freaking genius!!!

THANK YOU!!!

 

Seems like bones might be overkill for a little special effect. You could probably just get away with animating the texture of the chain. Either making 3 or 4 frames of animation and cycling it, or maybe writing a script to cycle the vertex UVs or the material's texture offset.

 

I did have the same thought.

Especially considering that the links will probably move more than one length per frame.

i’d be better off with some textures like you said, or heavily heavy motion blur.

 

IDK, looking at Doom and Gears it seems like the important thing is to spray blood and gore everywhere so you don’t even see the blade.

I’m going to try to do an animated blade with motion first, if it doesn’t squirt Serotonin or causes a performance dip I’ll try again.

 

@Not_Sure
Maybe an animated texture might work here.

 

IRL the teeth move fast enough when at full power that they become a blur, so faking it with textures might yield good results for that case.

If you want to have them moving slowly enough to still be visible (like when powering up/down), remember you only really need to animate the chain motion from one teeth to the next: after that you can achieve an illusion of continuous movement by looping the animation with a hard transition. This opens up many different solutions for animating them that don't require one joint per tooth:

- Vertex animation, either using blend shapes or custom vertex shader animation.
- Moving large groups of teeth using just a few joints. You can probably do it with only 3: one of the upper teeth (moves outwards), one for the bottom ones(moves inwards), and another for the ones in the curve (rotates).

 

Hello,
@No_Sure WOW!

 

Uh?