Seeking Advice on Rigging a Boardgame Spinner

Inkubo

I'm very new to DS rigging, so I'd like to ask for any wisdom you may have to offer.

Let's say I'm rigging a boardgame spinner which consists of a base that supports an arrow or Wheel of Fortune type spinning wheel. I envision one bone that acts like the center pin connecting the arrow to the base, whose twist is set to react to the Y Rotation parameter dial.

I'm trying to follow Jen Greenlees' tutorial on rigging a pair of pliers, since the pliers also consist of two parts connected by a pin, but I'm having some difficulty. Once I finish weight mapping the Y Rotation for the arrow part, no other transforms work on the base anymore. One could not, for example, depict my spinner stuck up on a wall, because it no longer reacts to X or Z rotation. I'm certainly missing or misunderstanding something.

Just as background information, I created my spinner as two separate objects in Blender, exported the parts as .OBJ files, and loaded the geometry for both parts into the dialog where you parent the bones. Then I dragged the arrow "bone" up so it became a child of the base, fixed all the names, clicked the Create button, and proceeded to do my weight mapping.

DrNewcenstein

Why not just set the spinner as the child of a center pin which is parented to the static board base?

Inkubo

That sounds like a decent Plan B. I'm hoping to make a salable item, so I think I would prefer actual rigging so that the arrow only responds to the single correct parameter dial which applies to it. (But that statement assumes I understand the benefits of rigging.)

nonesuch00

Inkubo said:

That sounds like a decent Plan B. I'm hoping to make a salable item, so I think I would prefer actual rigging so that the arrow only responds to the single correct parameter dial which applies to it. (But that statement assumes I understand the benefits of rigging.)

There is an Antique Clock in the PC+ list of products that the hands are rigged for. You could learn from their techniques. 

Or you could just puzzle it out with you school math: basically, you'd fix the local (x, y, z) coordinates on the spinner board so the center of the spinner would stay at the center of the spinner so best to make the spinner a child of the spinner board. Then there is rotate the spinner. What you'd want is the spinner to spin flat in 2D along X & Z dimensions so you'd lock those rotation at 0 and edit to allow the spinner hand to rotate on the Y roate axis 360 degrees.