CGTalk - Rigging a Tail

rusted_nut

04-17-2003, 05:05 AM

Hi all,
Have any of you guys and gals ever had to rig a tail. I started with a IK spline which gives me nice broad movements, but the IK spline doesn't allow me to curl the end of the tail. I don't want to have to animated the tail using FK. I'm thinking of using two skeletons of the tail and constraining one to the other allowing but still have the benefit of both systems. Any suggestions would be apprenticed.

B_Lynn20

04-17-2003, 05:45 AM

I had that same problem. I was doing a squirrels tail. I tried Ik and had the same problem you did. What I ended up doing was set driven keys.
I had six joints in the tail and made four separate set driven keys.
The first 3 joints were set to go horizontally, the next was for the first 3 to go vertically. Then the last 3 were set for horizontal and then the last was vertical.

This way I could get the tail to flick the way I wanted and using horizontal and verical I could get any direction for the tail to turn.

I hope this will help you with your problem.

18th_Devil

04-17-2003, 06:03 AM

i dunno if this will help or not.
but this is for IK and FK switching, however i don't know if it will work with spline IK or not.

http://www.vfs.com/~m07goosh/Tutorials/ikfkswitching/ikfkswitching.htm

tut curtousy of goosh.

YankyBJeans

04-17-2003, 05:11 PM

What about assigning a cluster to the cv's on the spline and then assigning them weight? That way the ones at the end move the most, the one at the body moves none, and the ones inbetween move in various levels up from that. I used this on my characters spine and got a pretty good motion/curl from it.

Yanky

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