Animating branches

[Illusion-shadow]

How will the branch be animate? if the branch always connect to the TV and you want to used the movement of the TV to drive the movement of the trunk (the body), you might want to set up a spline IK. Please give me some more detail info on how you want to animated this, so I can help you better.

[veldkoning]

Hi, thanks for your respond!
Yes, the tv will be my main and only product which will be animated.
First I tried to make a simple HI solver and attach all branch ends as a child to the parent (tv)
But moving the tv makes is difficult to add secondary motion to the IK chain.
If I move the end of the branche, I would like to have more control at the start of the branche.
I am quit new to the whole rigging stuff. Don't really know what the best way is to start of with this project. Any help is very much appreciated!

[Illusion-shadow]

what you need to do is to create an spline IK system. For what you need, you might just be fine by following the spline IK tutorial that come with max. It is not the best spline IK system, but it should be just fine for your setup, since you don't need a very wide range of movement. Go ahead and try that set up first, if that doesn't work, I can make you a proper splineIK set up file for you to dissect. You can also search this forum, I remember there is a script someone wrote that will create a spline IK system.

[veldkoning]

That is just the problem.
When I try to move my last (end branche) helper, which is attached to the tv.
All other helpers in the hierarchy won't move with the first helper, should I work with a position controller and give the other helpers a percentage?

[edwardG]

I'm not sure how to do this in Max yet, but if you can access the different points in the spline, you could parent constrain those to the TV, and as it goes further down the branch the parent constrain isn't as influential.

In maya, you need to create Clusters out of the Control Vertices on the spline to start that process. Then you would create 2 controls, 1 at the base, 1 at the tip, and parent constrain each cluster to both controls. Then you would adjust the "weight" between each constraint and it would work just fine.

[Illusion-shadow]

yes, you will need to use a position constraint with different percentage down the chain, you can also check out Maxine that come with Max8 or 9, that's a really good example of a SplineIK set up. Let me know if you need any further help.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.