3dsmax: Help in animating a scrissor lift with IK

Hi,

I have desperately tried to make scissor lift that would be easily animated just animating a simple helper object up/down. I've tried to make the IK for the lift using both HD and HI solvers. Can't seem to get the IK to behave right.

How do I make the scissors rotate so that they are all in the same angle? And how do I make the centerline in both scissors stay aligned - since they are in real life bolted together from the middle.

Any ideas, I been working with this for days now!

See a picture of the lift google for "Genie Scissor GSTM Lifts GS-2668 RT".

I will post the image for those like me that don't know what is a scissor lift.


The task is quite interesting.
I haven't tried yet but here is my idea.
Create several dummies that will move up and down and wire the Y parameter to the driving dummy. Then use a look at control for the scissor planks to look at those dummies. The planks should be simple objects with the pivot in the middle.

It is my first idea so it can be rather stupid

Hi, B1owfish! Can you post more details on how you tried to do it and not succeeded?

Andyba, your proposed method is not clear to me...
Can you show some images or screens?

As I said I didn't try it yet. Anyway using wired transforms it can be done in any way.