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I want to model the limbs of this type of lamp such that I can mechanically move the structure into different poses without having to manually move each object piece one by one.

I have spent some time trying to do this with bones, but the fact that you have adjacent 'arms' that are connected to the same solid piece at each end (with hinges) makes it not behave as desired with single bones.

If not with bones/armatures, is it possible with some other method within Blender?

Crude example of armature mechanics

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    $\begingroup$ Same technique as a ditch digger arm $\endgroup$
    – sambler
    Commented Jan 4, 2015 at 8:52
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks @samber Initially I thought his technique wouldn't work because he implies the lengths need to be the same, but I saw what he did with 'track to' and was able to do that with my bones of different lengths. $\endgroup$
    – MrVimes
    Commented Jan 4, 2015 at 13:03

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@sambler provided a link to a tutorial by Jonathan Williamson of Blender Cookie. (Thankyou) The part where the bucket connects to the rest of the arm contains similar mechanics to what I'm looking for. By following that part of the tutorial I've used the 'track to' constraint and I think this will work.

http://youtu.be/r-V8ihRUsTE

Screencast keys have been removed from blender 2.73 (rc at least)

So I used edit mode to extrude one extra small bone. ctrl-d (copy) to copy the large bone (in edit mode so it's part of the same group of bones) then ctrl-shift-c to bring up the menu where I choose 'track to' then in the bone constraints menu change the head/tail value to 1.

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    $\begingroup$ even though screencast is not part of the bundled add-ons since 2.72, it is still possible to use it. You can download it here: wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/… $\endgroup$
    – user1853
    Commented Jan 4, 2015 at 15:52
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks. It's not very often that I'll need to use it, but I'll download it if I do. For this one-off I used youtube's annotations to indicate what I was doing on the keyboard in my demo video. $\endgroup$
    – MrVimes
    Commented Jan 4, 2015 at 17:32

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