lamp rigging

[bardo]

i'm going mad.
Probably for professional rigger my question result a stupid problem....

Now..i explain my problem.

I have a simple lamp formed by 3 elements like this.
...............................___________________ _______________
...........................1..|___________________ ______________|
.........................________|..|________
........................|......................... ...|
..................2....|.......................... ..|
........................|.________________.|
........................||...........3............ ||
..........................|_______________|

.....Y
.....|
X--|

1 -rail where fix the lamp and where lamp has pivot to rotate.
2 - chassis of lamp that can rotate in Y of 360°
3 - lamp that can rotate in X from -90° to +90°

My question is:
How can i make to use a dummy object(or 2 dummies) to rotate 1 and 2 elements??

I've tested with LookAt contraint but i can't control what axis can rotate and what not.
Because i'm not really skilled with rigging tools can you give me some input to realise it?

Thanks in advance.

Excuse for this ugly ASCII-style figure but here i can't upload any images(no FTP, and NO imgeshack and similar)

Riccardo

[Olli96]

hmm, the lamp is pretty basic, why do you want to create dummys when you can rotate them directly ? but if you really want to use dummys, then link all parts together (bottom to top) and use wire parameters or the reaction manager.
with wire parameter you can wire transformations (and other stuff) to other objects, so in your case you would wire the y-axis of part 2 to the y-axis (or any other axis or attribute) of your dummy object.
with the reaction manager you can set up states which you could use for part 3 of your lamp to avoid wrinting an expression for it in the wire paramter dialog. more on creating states can be found at the excellent rigging tutorials that came with max. right now i dont have the time to explain it in detail...

Olli