CGTalk - Skipping Rope Rig

musashidan

02-06-2009, 10:32 PM

I'm trying to come up with a decent method of rigging a rope.I'm an animator and have very little experience of rigging.I've basically tried hand animating a spline mesh and matchmoving by keyframing which was mainly a test to see if it might allow me to avoid rigging............
it didn't :) then i moved to a basic FK rig setup which was better but far from ideal. Does anyone know of a fairly straightforward setup to achieve this? Basically the rope will be static where the character holds the handles/grips(or whatever the correct skipping rope terminology is)and will obviously be seen to interact with the ground.

i'm using Max.cheers.

Geuse

02-08-2009, 10:36 AM

Well. if it doesn't need to be an advanced setup you could use a spline ik joint chain parented to a group.

It goes like this. The group is only to be used for the rotation. So the spline ik rotates using the group and the joint chain itself is animated using the spline vertex:s. You know, clusters or smooth bind the spline to separate joints. I guess you'd also like to have the handle move slightly in a circle, ie. following the characters hand's motion. For this you'd want to animate the translation of the group aswell. So start off animating the group as desired. Then you'll probably observe the spline chain interesecting the ground so to fix this you animate the clusters to stay flat to the surface on impact and then bowlike in the top(above the characters head). I hope my quick explanation are sufficient.

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02-08-2009, 10:36 AM

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