How’s that for a title?

Okay, so high off of my writing that last post about rigging, I began thinking, “How can I rig the XR-311’s A-Arm suspension assembly in SketchUp?”

I thought I was going to have to rig this vehicle in Maya. But I after learning more about Maya and realizing that I should keep the importing files back and forth between the two apps (Maya and SketchUp) at a minimum, my brain was prime to come up with a SketchUp solution.

I won’t go into detail but, I figured out how to mock up the suspension arms, the shock, the CV joint and the wheel to an acceptable level of manipulation. With only 5 nodes (the rear wheels don’t need the 5th node, because they do not steer but they’re there anyway).

Here is a shot of the control nodes for the the XR311:

So in fact this is a pretty simple control node set. I might add the steering wheel in the future, but that’s easy enough to rotate in the detailed geometry.

You only need to perform these operations; rotate, move, rotate, and rotate (if it’s the front wheel), for each wheel when posing. Yeah, sounds like a lot, but it’s better than my other options.

Here are some shots of it in action: