Best way to animate tentacle, my idea so far

#1

Hi everyone. I need to animate a tentacle on top of live footage back plate. The tentacle has to descend and wrap around a woman in the shot and then pull her up. I have the tentacle bound to a spline ik joint chain.

I have been trying to figure out how to get the tentacle to wrap around the woman, and am thinking of just making a spiral curve and having the clusters from the ik spline curve follow the spiral curve as a motion path.

Does anyone have insight about this and know of a better way to do it? I’m not even sure my idea will work out.

Many thanks for any help!

#2

That is a way you could do it, but I feel it is very limited. The way I would go about it is, setup a clean Ik spline setup, layer in fk controls, and use a ribbon setup to drive the chain when it’s curled. With this setup you have better control, in my opinion.

The Fk system would me the animators main control set.
While the ik spline controls could be used for extra arcing(either through manual input or an attribute setup.).
Lastly use the ribbon driven by some attributes to control the tightness of the curl(in reference to the world up.).

If you wanna get really fancy, you could try using distance nodes or even muscle nodes to drive the contact from the chain to the mesh of the woman. Just some words for thought, your way works too of course. :thumbsup:

#3

Thanks! That’s very helpful. What is a ribbon setup?

#4

I’m not entirely too sure how it’s done as I’ve heard of a colleague attempting something like this, but maybe you could apply a hair dynamic to your curve influencing the spline IK and just turn collisions on?

I know it’s very general but I hope this helps :stuck_out_tongue:

#5

watch this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIcZdkNVHjE

#6

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