Animation

Rigging and Animation:

This part proved to be more difficult than I'd have liked. At first it seemed easy, adjust the pivot points of the objects to be where the towbars were connected, but to actually animate with those proved to be a very hard task for me. 

I chose 3 animations to use for my final, which included:

• Train and carts following a circle path, as they would on a railroad. I also added them bopping up and down for a bit of fun.
• The train's wheel blocks (The rectangular boxes covering the wheels, this is what I called them here, because they're actually called wheel rods, but I kept saying the wheel rods were the cylinders that the wheels were attached to) coming out and waving to the camera.
• The train stopping, crouching down, then zooming back to it's starting position, to allow for a loop effect. (This ended up not working quite right, but I couldn't fix it due to reason I'll state soon)

To get the train and carts to follow a path in a circle, I simple created a circle, and used path constraint on the objects to put them on the circle and start spinning. However, this created quite a few problems with my other planned animations, because as soon as I started to alter what happened to them on the timeframe, it would mess up the loop, and the train would reverse itself (This actually worked for my final animation idea, so that was lucky)

Eventually I managed to get the animations to a level I was mostly happy with, but there were problems with the objects occasionally flipping with any scale change, as well as disconnection between the models as they followed along the path. I was unable to fix these issues, but I'm still happy with my end result.