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how to lock the rotation of a ratchet wheel in one direction?

Edit: The ratchet is part of a gear train and is driven by a driver which has random positive and negative rotations. My goal is it only to use the negative (or positive, I've to figure out the direction) values of the driver.

I tried it with the limit rotation constraint but unfortunately that didn't worked (or I'm using it wrong)

Ratchet Wheel

Fabian
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    I think you can have a hacky setup of constraints, drivers and empty parents, that will allow you to achieve that. Question is why? Can't you just make sure every time you rotate the wheel, you only increase or only decrease the rotation value? – Markus von Broady Sep 18 '21 at 22:24
  • The ratchet is part of a gear train and is driven by a driver which has random positive and negative rotations. My goal is it only to use the negative (or positive, I've to figure out the direction) values of the driver. – Fabian Sep 19 '21 at 08:16
  • Do you rely on constraints? It sounds like your issue comes from the fact that constraints use quaternion rotations internally, which discard information about number of rotations and therefore flip sign of rotation suddenly. How limit rotation constraint work?, possible solution: Non-wrapping rigid body rotations? – Markus von Broady Sep 19 '21 at 10:05
  • From my experience, you don't have to think of each position of the gear as negative/positive change from the previous state. Instead, think how the rotation of the gear relates to the rotation of a previous gear. Now, this will only work, if a previous gear is not having its rotation "reset" after each full rotation back to 0 - because then effectively you lose some information, e.g. 1:2 ratio gears, where A has x teeth, B has 2x teeth, will mean the full cycle is A from 0 to 720° , B from 0 to 360°. If A drives B and resets at 360° to 0, B will reset after half of rotation. – Markus von Broady Sep 19 '21 at 10:11

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