Armor Rig

[TechnicallyArtistic]

I'd do a dobule rig. So liek you have one joint for the upper arm that the skin is attached to. Then a duplicate of that joint that follows the skinning joint, but at the same time you can add onto it and moove it farther if you need to (skinning joint goes from the clavical to th shoulder to the elbow. select the shoulder, duplicate it, unparent it from the clavicle and parent it to the sholder. so then it's controlled by the shoulder but it can still rotate on it's own)

Then you can animat it bounding, slidng, etc. It'd take a little more set up than that ofcourse, but that's the basics of it. At least without doing it with any kind of dynamics.

Another slight variation of that would be again duplicate the arm at the shoulder, move it up and in so it's pivot point is at the pivot ponit of the armor. Duplicate the armors shoulder joint (delete the children joints) and parent the new single joint to the armor shoulder joint (we're trying to get two on top of each other.) and then parent that new joint to the clavicle. You could constrain orient that single jonit we crated to the skinning shoulder. So again the armor rotates with the arm, but can have added on animation as well, and I think it'd naturaly slide then.

For soemthnig like teh chest armor, if you want it to slide around the body, I don't have any sound theories for, but just an idea. maybe make a two joints chain along the spine. parent constrain the new chain to both shoulders and maybe the hips or lower spine (grab all three jonits at once then then new chain last and it'll have a shared constraint on it then) The armor may float over the body a little when the character moves then, without you having to animatie anything by hand for the chest peice.

Anyway, that's probably all I got.

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