Modeled and textured in 3ds Max 2012
Made a rig where all the controls are linked to each other. This way the animator does not have to count every teeth of the gear, to make sure the gearmeshes do not go through each other. There is a red wheel next to my model, if you rotate that, every gear rotates in the correct way, and the trainrails go up or down. The rope follows, and is mesh animated. (the green planes ) I divided the rope in several separate meshes, since animating the texture of the rope would not be saved when exporting as a fbx to unity. Then I made this rig which auto moves the planes back as soon as they are beyond a certain position. This way it looks like the rope is getting longer, without the need to stretch my texture or animate the rope through code in Unity.
note: the animated gif looks sometimes like it spins backwards or does not spin at all, that is because there are only about 20 frames. So if the gear makes a rotation of about the same distance between the gears, it will look like he ended in the same position in the next frame. This is the same effect as a car wheel that looks like it spins backwards
