D4ng3rmouse
07-19-2007, 04:12 PM
Hi everyone, first off i hope that im not asking something that has been asked before. I did have a search and found a few topics but they all seemed to be a bit old and not exactly what i was looking for. Anyway
At the moment I am trying to create a rig for a tentacle type object. To get the general movement I wanted I just figured that i would use a spline IK and cluster the curve. The problem with this I have found is you get ok movement but it was hard to get enough control over the tip of the tectacle. Therefore I have thought of having spline IK for the main body of the tentacle and fk control of the joints at the tip for some extra articulation. Anyway my main problem is I now need to get this tentacle to wrap around an object and pick it up while still curled around it. I figure that I need to use a motion path and attatch my tentacle bones to this path to get it to wrap around. Therefore at the moment I have 3 bone chains and controls,
- 1 set are the actual deofmation bones the geometry gets skinned to,
-1 set is the IK spline and fk bit for the articlulation at the tip
- 1 chained where each bone is attatched to a motion path of a curve. Then i broke the time expression on the U value and created an expression of my own which means i only move the joint at the tip and the rest of the joints follow behind along the path.
I've then used nodes to create a blend control to blend the control between the spline IK and the chain along the motion path.
I still need to figure out how to keep i wraped up and still have it picked up. I guess ill have to create another set of controls a level above the IK spline ones or something.
I'm just wondering if anyone has any thoughts of a better way to do this. For one thing it takes a quite a while to setup, although im impriving this by creating scripts now. Also it seems to be overly conplicated but its the only way i can figure it out at the moment the hard bit is going to be animating the blend between controls as ill have to try and get the motion path curve into a position that will hopefully follow on from where the IK spline is. Anyway any ideas or points in the right direction would be great. Idealy id love something a bit like the tentacles in pirates of the caribean but I think i read somewhere that the rig for those are actually quite harcore. Who would have thought rigging an object that is basically a cylinder would be so hard!!!
At the moment I am trying to create a rig for a tentacle type object. To get the general movement I wanted I just figured that i would use a spline IK and cluster the curve. The problem with this I have found is you get ok movement but it was hard to get enough control over the tip of the tectacle. Therefore I have thought of having spline IK for the main body of the tentacle and fk control of the joints at the tip for some extra articulation. Anyway my main problem is I now need to get this tentacle to wrap around an object and pick it up while still curled around it. I figure that I need to use a motion path and attatch my tentacle bones to this path to get it to wrap around. Therefore at the moment I have 3 bone chains and controls,
- 1 set are the actual deofmation bones the geometry gets skinned to,
-1 set is the IK spline and fk bit for the articlulation at the tip
- 1 chained where each bone is attatched to a motion path of a curve. Then i broke the time expression on the U value and created an expression of my own which means i only move the joint at the tip and the rest of the joints follow behind along the path.
I've then used nodes to create a blend control to blend the control between the spline IK and the chain along the motion path.
I still need to figure out how to keep i wraped up and still have it picked up. I guess ill have to create another set of controls a level above the IK spline ones or something.
I'm just wondering if anyone has any thoughts of a better way to do this. For one thing it takes a quite a while to setup, although im impriving this by creating scripts now. Also it seems to be overly conplicated but its the only way i can figure it out at the moment the hard bit is going to be animating the blend between controls as ill have to try and get the motion path curve into a position that will hopefully follow on from where the IK spline is. Anyway any ideas or points in the right direction would be great. Idealy id love something a bit like the tentacles in pirates of the caribean but I think i read somewhere that the rig for those are actually quite harcore. Who would have thought rigging an object that is basically a cylinder would be so hard!!!