Steam and Wiper Arm Animation

I think you will find wipers only work with Diesels and Electric locos.
Similarly pantographs only work with electrics.

Paul

Hi…

I posted this over in the 3DTrains forum – but – I thought it may work better here… It seems that the steam market plays better on the ‘other’ <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –> side of the ocean… So if you have seen this in the 3Dtrains forum – my apologies…

I am trying to use the ‘Wiper Arm’ animation to animate my bell on a steam locomotive and here is what I have done…

Well I played around with this last night… I easily animated the bell in 3DC – ran the animation test and it worked like a champ… It looked really good… However – when I loaded it into MSTS – no joy…

I named a single group for the animated portions of the bell as ‘WiperArmLeft1’ and I created the animation on the ‘X’ axis… I exported and loaded to MSTS… In MSTS I hit ‘v’ and nothing happened…

Does anyone know for a fact if the wiper animation works on Steam Locos ?

I animated on the ‘X’ axis – most wipers are probably done on the ‘Z’ axis… Could the axis I chose to animate possible affect this working in MSTS ???

I used the same 16 Key Frames that are associated with the Piston Rod and Connecting Rod animations… If I get the wipers to work – would the speed of the wipers be directly linked to how fast the locomotive was going ???

Thanks…
Scott