Armature exercise simulator

Okay, time to roll up our sleeves and get to work building and actuating armatures. To do that, we've created an animatronic simulator for you to use. Let's start by loading a pre-built armature. This is called a four bar linkage. The blue edges are called rods, they represent bars of metal that have a fixed length. The green circles are called nodes. They represent points at which rods meet, like if you drilled a hole in the end of a rod and put a pin through it so that the rods can pivot. The orange edge is a linear actuator, which in the real world might be a pneumatic or hydraulic cylinder. If I go over to the animate tab you can see how the armature moves as the actuator moves in and out. An interesting thing about the four bar linkage is that this edge always stays vertical. This can be handy when you want a character to hide behind something, then pop up to reveal themselves as part of a show. Now let's go back to the build tab and see how to create the four bar linkage. I can add nodes like this. And I can create rods by clicking on two nodes, like this. You can also delete rods, like this. I want to weld these two rods together to make sure that the angle between them doesn't change. I do that by adding an angle constraint. I first click the add angle option, then I select the two rods I want to constrain. I want to pin down these nodes so they don't move. I do that by selecting the node, then clicking the pinned option. Finally, I can turn a rod into a linear actuator, like this. I can also attach a motor to an angle, like this. Those are the basics, now see what you can come up with.