Hello I have to animate an conveyor belt.

But I don’t have a good Idea..?

Do you have a good idea how to do this.
I have made a motion path, and convert it to a Bezier curve, but I can’t make it an open cure.

Also the plates from the conveyor must face always to the surface
Is there a good way to do this?

I hope this file gives you a good idea.

Hello Sadu,
Thanks for your advise. and effort. Its a lot of work. I see that the bars doesnt move. those bars moves the object on the beld. In this case small parts, it moving slowley to the top
Is it posible to move the bars on the beld?

Ton

Hello galinaton.
The bars on the bed are moving. Just color a side of any single bar only and press play.
Speed of animaton is controlled by offset para on sort_ANIMATE_BELT sop. Change this para to get the desired speed.

Your entire model is cached off model bits and no surprise as this is how you historically do models for all other 3d apps. Build it final and then pound the crap out of it.

I attached a file that creates a conveyor belt rig which is built on-the-fly and doesn't require you to build complicated rigs on top of your hard model geometry. The Carve SOP and using NURBs and Mesh primitives is key.

You can substitute your own belt blades in place of the grid place-holder I created. Just make sure your blade aims downt the +Z axis and up is Y as per usual in Houdini.

Right now the rig is pretty basic and doesn't support any of the pulleys rotated arbitrarilly to get a bendy belt but that is entirely possible btw. For now please keep the pullies all on the same plane but to be sure I locked off all the object parms that shouldn't be touched. Just move the pully objects in to place by adjusting the Root and the pully objects.

To support bendy belts, instead of one belt curve, just build two and use the Rails SOP instead of Sweep.

You can add dynamics to the belt after it is extruded but you will have to warp the blades if they are to be bendy. And on and on…

If you want the pully rotation in X to drive things, that's basic math. You know the radius of the pully, the unit divisions of the belt and put the trig in the Carve SOP instead of the $T I have in there.

All old school Houdini techniques going back to PRISMS days here.

Hello Jeff,

Yes, I can see that this is whole new approach for me.
Thank you very much for your explanation.
The animation is the wrap($T/-10, 0, 1) entry . the animation starts -10 frames.
If the animation to slow down, here is this to be handled
Thanks,

Ton

put point wrangle under your curve and type this
@P = primuv(0,“P”,0,frac(.9999*((float)@ptnum/(@numpt-1)+chf(“Offset”))));

No at all