Tail of Character Seperates When Animating?

[Darksuit]

right off the bat, I would take a stab and say that you tail plug is not bound to the skeleton. At least it appears that way from the image. I will see about taking a look at the file.

[Darksuit]

OK, taking a look at this...
breathing deeply.

Name Everything and Freeze Transforms on controls.

The problem you are seeing on your tail comes from the way you have your IK setup. It is breaking your rig and causing bad transformation pivots. This is mainly caused by controls that are not moving with the rest of the rig but moving and anchoring themselves in separate locations.

you may be better off using a FK tail, or and IKspline for the tail. In all honesty I would say do a simple FK Control setup if you need an IK spline setup you can use the one here:(http://www.darksuit.com/tutorials) and for the IK spline you can easily turn the this on its side and parent the base Global in the tutorial to the Pelvis. That will have everything move at the same time.

When naming thngs this includes your file do not use spaces and dashes.

This character does not need 1 million Triangles. All it's going to do is bloat your scene size and make your life really uncomfortable. You could do this same character under 2000 Triangles.

Clean your Geometry before you bind it will make your life easier.

If you are not going to see a part of the mesh delete it. (ie the inside of the leg).


You have Too many Polys. Those Connector pieces do not need to be 20,000 polygons. If you need a smooth surface you should be averaging normals. Not smoothing, or subdividing (but thats just me.)

There are also a numbe rof tutorials on doing a foot rig in this forum. Look any of those up.

[AnimatedIntelligence]

Great! You just mentioned new problems that my 3 university professors didn't bother to point out three months ago. Jeez.
Anyway...
I guess at a million poly's its probably the most inefficient robot ever. A lot of that is the result of using the nurbs to poly tool I think (starting out I liked nurbs a lot!) I'll definitely try to fix up the geometry and pivot points, though I think it works ok for what I need too a simple 10second running animation (from far away!), I just need that plug to connect. I'm trying it out right now but If there is any chance at all that you can confirm that your advice would indeed fix that, I'd hate to spend another full day trying only for it to not work, but if it does I don't mind spending the whole day, (previous efforts resulted in fixing the plug but the metal prongs started to offset).

I know it may sound like I'm looking for duck tape. But with my time crunch I kinda am :cry:

EDIT:

Its been fixed!!! Many thanks to all of you, I definitely appreciate all your help Dark you have definitely taught me the importance of organization and my overwhelming need for efficiency. I'll let you know how things are going along. But I think (I hope anyway) I got it from here.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=6253517#post6253517

[Darksuit]

No problem.
When I was teahcing these are some of the things that I used to say on a regular basis. Freeze and Name. Just these two things alone will save you tons of time and trouble. You will certainly do ok. You can do a quick FK tail control and group all your controllers under a global controller. It really not as many problems. When your done with the class you may want to redo the rig knowing know some of the things you have learned outside of the classroom.

Choose one method for modeling if your doing sub-d, poly or Nurbs stick with one. When your starting out I would suggest starting with Polygons. When your modeling just evalutate your model and ask yourself if a polygon is really adding to your model or if its just there.

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