Hello,

I’m working on building a robot in 3ds Max 2010 and it has some pistons and arms which extend out.  I’ve attached the file so hopefully my explanation below will help you understand whats the problem. 

For the arm that extends i found a tutorial on this site and was able to get the arm functioning correctly using the whole pivot points, linking, and HIS IK so when the piston extends it moves some of joins and the piece that will kick the soccer ball extends, all this is good.  But I want to be able to move the whole robot as one by selecting the “Main Chassis” object.  I have all the other parts links, I have the driving piece of the IK system linked and everything moves except the end node on the ik chain. It’s a dummy point linked to the metal arm that rotates and if I try linking it to the chassis like i do with all the other objects it becomes unregistered to the IK somehow and the whole IK system fails. 

I thought maybe there would be a way to use multiple dummy objects on the same point and then setup some postion constraints as a work around but I always end up breaking the IK somehow.

When you first open the scene just try moving the object “Kicker Piston” and see how the arm works.  Then select the “Main Chassis” and move it up and notice how that one node stays since i can’t find a way to link it to the body without breaking IK. 

Thanks in advance.

Also, on another note, I’m running AMD / ATI 9.12 drivers on a 5850 and there are a lot of redraw problems, like if i have some polygons selected and i press R for the scale tool when i mouse over the scale gizmo it disappears sometimes and then I can’t tell which plane i’m scaling on which is very frustrating. Just wanting to know if anyone else has problems with 9.12 drivers with 3ds max, I know the 9.12 also has problems with photoshop it seems.

UPDATE: I think the attachment system is broken or something so here is another link:

http://www.mattmazzola.net/projects/3D/new_robot_20.max