how do you rig a fish's fin?

[seven6ty]

What package are you using?

There are a number of ways to do this, depending on what you want out of it.

[virtualmesh]

You could skin your fin's verts to a bones system. Parent the fin bones to your fish's body skeleton. Then set up expressions so that when the fish swims through water, the fin bones react to the anticipated flow of the water current against the fin(s).

Depending on the fish's 'real world' mass, it's fins will react differently in water. Small light and almost transparent fish fins would have a greater delay effect to the parent bone reactions than the converse - fins that are larger and heavier. Go to the local fish store and see how different fishes move. note that the smaller the fish, the greater their fins ripple at a stationary stance.

You could even set up motion controllers to replicate an automated noise or ripple (at very small frequencies) to the bones within your fins. In this case, I would use two bones within each 'fin-bone' so there's one at the base 'base-bone' and another at the rim of the fin 'rim-bone'. Apply the noise/ripple motion controller to the 'rim-bone' of the fin, affecting the movement from side to side (not forward/backward).

[ckl]

Thanks for the info Virtualmesh, but I want the effect to be part of my rig. In your case I would have to have a body of water for the fish to swim through right? That's not what I want. I want the effect to happen without a body of water.

Response to seven5ty, I'm using Maya 7 Unlimited. Can you show me any way of doing it?

[seven6ty]

Ah, well, like I said, it depends on the type of control and look you want. I'd probably prefer to get into using a spline IK controlled joint chain and make it into a dynamicly controlled curve, so that you can put wind and drag forces on it and such and have it react in a more lifelike and fluid motion. You can also use expressions and such, telling it to take the distance travelled or velocity, and use that, in an offset manner, to drive the rotations of the joints, one after the other, to rotate in a sine wave manner. The dynamics setup has a number of different approaches you can take as well and can get complicated quickly. Best resource for this that I've seen so far is from the Art of Rigging book, where you can find out how to do it using hair follicles and soft body dynamics.

[ckl]

Thanks for the advice Seven6ty. It was helpful. Finally, I'm getting somewhere. Thanks again for the advice.

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