I’ve been working on a robot the last few weeks, and it has a good amount of cables and hoses which need to be rigged. I’ve started out by setting them up with skeletons - Basically, a joint chain going in the opposite direction of the extremity they’re attached to. I thought this, combined with IKSolvers would be a good way to do it. Now I’m stuck yet again.
You see, the cables are connected to metal pipes at both ends, which means the IKs shouldn’t affect the outermost joints - They shouldn’t move at all, be completely stiff. At first I just made an IKSolver spanning the entire chain, but of course that didn’t work out - The IK makes it so that the end of the cable would rotate around its joint’s axis completely freely, ignoring the fact that it’s supposed to fastened to a completely immovable metal pipe.
Essentially, I want the IK’s to have no influence on the joints at the ends of the cables, but increasing influence towards the middle, simulating a stiff but not completely rigid cable, like a waterhose, fastened to rigid objects.
Using dynamics for this is a rather tiresome and slow process, considering that there are around 50 cables in total on my model, which all need to act dynamically as the robot moves. In addition to that, the feedback isn’t direct in the same way - You cant just swing models leg around and get direct feedback on how the cables look, if the rig works out. I’d rather just use joints and IK’s, as long as its possible to tune the influence of the IK’s on the joints under it.
So, how would I go about setting this up?
Or if it’s not possible, what would be your suggestion on how to fix it? Is there a way to simulate… I guess my option would be softbodies… in realtime, in the viewport? I mean without keying the movement of my joints playing the animation back?
