more on armature movement

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi all,

I’ve got a little guy with tentacles.

Anyway, I’ve done IK on the tentacles, and currently I’m moving them by dragging empties at their ends. However, this method has the unfortunate side-effect of not being able to properly position where, exactly, the bend in the middle of the tentacle should go. IE, I may want the tentacle to bend down, but it bends up, or it flops around in an animation between single keyframes.

Has anyone developed a method to move ropelike armature objects so that you can choose where the bends happen and which direction those bends face?

So far I tried adding an extra NULL bone in the middle of the chain and applying a track to to it; this doesn’t work. Blender seems to break the IK chain or to ignore the bone completely. The other solution I tried was to add a Track To constraint to one of the bones in the middle of the tentacle’s IK chain, but this … had undesirable results. ^-^

Here are two images. The empty target is hardly moved, but the test tentacle I made flips entirely:

http://ministryofdoom.org/cloud/files/tent1.png
http://ministryofdoom.org/cloud/files/tent2.png

Best case scenario I’d like to be able to add something near the hump which controls hump direction.

Any help on this?

Thanks in advance!

  • Cloud

Edit: Incidentally, here’s a test animation of my character:

http://ministryofdoom.org/cloud/files/littleguy1.mp4

You need quicktime. See how that one tentacle cuts through his throat near the end of the animation?

2

https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=283756#283756

In a nutshell, you can force your IK chain to bend a certain way by rotating individual bones in the chain. Depending on which one you rotate and in which direction, the effect will be different so experiment with that yo get a hang of it.

Martin

3

Heh, I forgot about that old post; I guess I still haven’t gotten the hang of it, and it’s driving me up the wall.

I’ve been playing a lot with Hash and Maya lately (friends have been… indoctrinating … me) and I was hoping someone had gotten a technique better than rolling bones.