Creating realistic steam train? Starting point?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

I’m trying to play around with creating a controllable steam train (for my 3 year old train obsessed boy to play with) and want to have the wheels with moving crank shafts, connecting rods etc.

I have purchased a model of a nice train in Maya which has 4 wheels (each side) with connecting rods that move nicely when you move the wheels, using locators and constraints.
However doing some searching, it seems that these things are not really possible to import into Unreal via FBX import.

What would be the best route to start going down to achieve what I want.

I was looking at maybe joints on objects (e.g. the wheels) and using sockets to connect the connecting rods to multiple wheels, but this doesn’t seem to work.
Is it just a simple matter of exporting the train baked with an animation cycle in Maya and then playing the animation as the train is moved by user control?

Any pointers would be most welcome.

2

First I would try to rig it to a set of bones in maya. One bone at the center of each wheel, one bone at the root of each rod. All bones connected to root bone. import it as a skeletal mesh. Animation itself would be done in animation blueprint.
After import add a socket almost on the edge of the wheel, where rod should be attached. In animation blueprint you could find a LookAt rotation from rod root to socket on a wheel, rotate rod by this rotation and move it along it’s X axis until it touches the socket. I don’t remember how rod root connection looks mechanically but I think it’s like a smaller wheel. Which again can be animated and have a socket attached on a side. So every frame you just attach rod root to that socket before you do the rotation.