Sci-fi Landing Gear

Sci-fi is one of my favorite genres, so I wanted to create something that would help refamiliarize me with rigging. Some landing gear seemed like the right move, nothing overly complicated, just a slice of something much larger. After searching around the internet for some cool concepts and reference of aircraft landing gear, I started.

The model was fairly straightforward, it wasn't the focus of the project so I didn't want to spend too much time on it.

When it came to shading/texturing, I did spend some extra time trying to figure out what look I wanted. From the beginning, I knew this landing gear would belong to an industrial and blocky ship and the look had to reflect it. I took a lot of inspiration from different construction vehicles.

Rigging was the focus for this project. I don't have a ton of previous experience, and it's been several years since I last tried it; this was my first time in Blender. I started off by watching a lot of mechanical rigging tutorials online. Once I had worked out the interface and where all the new shortcuts are, I got to work.

The rig ended up pretty simple, I had already envisioned how I wanted it to move beforehand so I knew what it needed to accomplish.

What I learned from most was rigging the pistons, especially the back one. Most other tutorials had used damped tracks to point them at each other, but I quickly found out I couldn't take that approach because it would create a dependency loop. Bone.008 is looking at the position of Bone.009 and Bone.009 is looking at the position of Bone.008 and so on.

After playing around with it and searching through animation forums, I found a solution. I parented an empty to part of the mesh and used that as the target for one of the pistons.

And the final result!