Problem with rigging plate armor

#1

Hey everyone!

Lately I’ve been working on a new character (an Knight in armor)

I’m now at the point where i need to rig my models and everything works as it should so far. However i’ve ran into a small problem with my rig.

I am using an basic reverse foot control rig and at the feet of my character there are 3 pieces of plate armor one for the shin, one for the top of the foot and one for the toes. The shin and toes work fine but the one for the foot itself goes trough the shin when rotating the foot on its heel.

Ive come up with some ways to solve it by using driven animation bat that will give some problems aswell while animating. Is there any way to solve this by modifying the rig? and if so how?

Thanks in advance,

Rutgher

#2

if you have layered groups with multiple pivot points on the controller for that piece of armour, im sure a driven key should be able to resolve your issue, and if you wanted to be able to blend on or of the driven key, feed it as in input to a blend colour node and the an attribute on the controller as the blender.

Hope that helps.

#3

think about the armor. don’t treat it as a piece of geometry, treat it as if you had it on your foot. what does it do? does it bend? where does it attach? what are it’s limitations?

  • a back-story if you will ^^

the SDK is a valid approach, but i always ask myself - shouldn’t the animator be creating animation curves that control the movement of something? i have nothing against SDKs, don’t get me wrong, they’re down right handy, but if you’re trying to correct something, the animator should have the option to correct this on his own as well. Besides, I don’t know what would you have as a driver for the SDK, since rotation channels are never a good choice.

Now I may imagine the armor differently from what yours looks like, but I imagine this piece is probably stopped by the shin, and slides on the toes. In which case, I would go for an ikHandle setup, I believe that would mimic the behavior much more accurately.

#4

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