Rigging Quadruped Scapulas

[Darksuit]

first of all, I would remove the extra joint, it is not really needed. Rigging is mostly about faking what is there. You can achieve most of the motion from wieghting. The M bone structure is working against what you are attempting to achieve, as it is holding the wieght for the scapula in place. By removing the bone and have a more inverted V bone structure then weighting the scapula 25/75 front leg/spine you get a much cleaner effect in most cases, you can then accent the motion and deformation with an infulence object, but that should not be necessary.

[GeoffClark]

Thanks, David.
I played around with the 'M' setup, and also reasoned that there's no reason to have that extra bone at the spine intersection.
So what rigging approach can I take that will make the scapula follow these two rules:

1. go up and down along its X axis direction

2. swing in an aim-like constraint when the paw translates forward.

My guess is: an Single Chain solver IK handle on the scapula joint itself. this locks the length of that scapula's joint chain.
then, below that, a normal RP solver along the two joints that form the backwards elbow.

I'm quite used to the auto-scapula setup that can be used for bipeds with a scapula on the back side of the mesh. It uses a scapula joint that is aim-constrained at a locator , with another locator as an up-vector object. Could that setup be used as a parallell for quadruped scapula setup?

thanks,

[Remi]

The Great Dane rig on highend has a good setup invovling this, you might have a look at that and try and reverse engineer it. I did something similar on a dragon rig and it worked fine.....nothing about it is "auto" though, which I prefer, but you may be looking for more of an "auto" setup, which you could probably add to it if you wanted.

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