creating the pistons

The pistons proved to be the hardest. The actual piston was relatively easy, by using 2 cylindars and two and two boxes i was able to model the piston (no parts were actually attached), the hardest part was to get the piston to move in a "piston way" ie the top cylinder only moves up and down where as the boxes attached to the main cylinder would move in a circular motin pushing the piston up and down. To tackle this i used bones, after many atempts of trying to get the piston to only move up and down i finally found that you can use lines and then attach the main object to the line, in this case the piston head was attached to the line meaning that it could only move up and down but the boxes attached to the piston head where free to move in a circular pattern. After creating my first piston i decided to clone it so i could get 6 pistons, litte did i know cloning bones, ik solvers and lines was very difficult. At that point i thought that i would have to make 6 seperate pistons and bones, the drawback to this would be too much time taken up plus the possibility that they are not all identical. Before i attempted to start buling another 5 pistons from scratch i decided to try one thing. I made a saved copy of the 3ds file and then merged it with the one i was working with. To my surprise i was able to merge the piston files together which meant they had their own bone entities but were all still identical.