Source for open heart gear animations?

Hey there. Are there any decent sources for pre-made open heart or skeleton gear animations?

Not that I know of, but if you can make an image of a gear, you only need to put the rotational code in to make it spin. Then you just have to add various designs of gears, and spin speeds etc.

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Google gear generator. There’s a website that lets you configure size and tooth ratios for properly meshed gears then output to a vector or png. They are just monochromatic outlines, but can be used as templates to create your own graphics. Then as Raptor says it’s just a case of applying some rotation in creator.

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You can also look for gifs, they can be used in Sequence now.

If you’re interested in making an accurate gear train, there are a couple of free books that are useful references. They’re in the library of congress and free to download from there. One is Practical Course in Horology and the other is Modern Methods in Horology. Both were written in the first half of the 20th century and they’re a bit on the dry side. But they do explain gear ratios and have lots of other info. I also second @kvansant on googling gear generator. There are a few good ones out there. One that I initially thought was great, and ended up not being so useful, was geargenerator.com. Although it allows you to attach many gears together (as opposed to the usual two that many of the gear generator sites do), it’s not specifically geared towards watches, and so you can’t put the wheels (big gears) and pinion (small gears) together in the way that you would in a real watch. So, it’s good to learn the theory behind the ratios that make the gears move at the speeds that they do.

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Just wanted to revisit this, because I was DEAD wrong about geargenerator.com. You absolutely can group gears and pinions. In fact, it’s a superb source for working out gear ratios, and producing vector gears. As I work more and more with gears, I’m finding that using simple gear ratios takes a lot of the pain out of making a smooth working model in Facer. I assume CAD apps have special functions for this kind of thing (maybe?), but I do most of my work in Affinity Designer, and while you can create gears with it, it’s a bit of a painful process to create a working gearset. Anyway, use geargenerator just as a template, or to create your gear vectors, it’s a useful tool. Shame its a subscription model, but it’s cheap, and if you want to just use it to doodle gearings, and then as a template, you can work with it, without paying a penny. I don’t know if anyone else geeks out on this stuff, but I love it. :slight_smile:

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yeah! you know… I didn’t argue with you on that point when you made it because I hadn’t visited geargenerator in a while, but I was thinking that indeed you could assemble a set of gears of different sizes with proper ratios. Glad you’ve confirmed that! I made most of my gears a long time ago but with templates I outputted from that website. Now I have enough in my library I rarely need to make any new ones unless it’s something stylistic with the spokes or finishing, but even then I can work from the templates I already have. Before I found that site I had some funky photoshop methods to try to draw gear teeth :slight_smile: