I’m practicing spline ik by setting up a spline ik for a snake, which basically has two halves to it with different colors and patterns. So unlike a tail or tentacle, it actually visually matters how each bone is rotated along the direction of its length and I’m trying to implement a way to control that, which seems as though the developers made impossible for no reason whatsoever. I can rotate a curve’s vertex along the local x axis and along the local y axis, but nothing happens when I rotate a vertex of a path along the local z axis unless I do ctrl+t wich tilts, but I want it to tilt as as just a regular rotation because you can’t make a hook or bone “tilt” along with a curve vertex, and that’s the only thing in the entire world that I and the developers need to fix with the spline ik.
In other words, how can I make a simple armature rotation into a ctrl+t tilt for a specific vertex on a path?
I’m really not asking for much so I’m just going to bump whenever I see a bunch of other people’s questions answered before mine even gets a single reply.
Bump/Bump/Bump
Hi,
agreed. The splineIK is broken. I made a bug report a while ago which was instantly closed. Still a bit mad about it. See Toka’s post on this thread. He links to a setup of his that has a working twist control. It’s maybe not ideal for a snake, but try it, maybe it’ll work.
Hadrien
Sometimes you have to wait for one of us to read your post who has the knowledge to answer you. Getting all upset like this won’t help your cause too much.
I’m not sure it applies because I’m talking about just the vertices. The problem with a regular armature is that if I rotate one bone, it rotates all bones in front of it too. I just want to be able to rotate one vertex at a time. I could ALMOST accomplish this by not have a string of bones at all, but rather a series of bones next to each other but not parented to each other. The problem with that is they heavily deform the mesh and rotate a mesh around the center of origin no matter where its vertex group’s location is rather than specifically where a vertex is.
Ok I just figured out how to solve the problem on my own personal end, even though it doesn’t provide any solution whatsoever to the fact that vertices don’t rotate about their own length. When you imagine rigging a snake, you imagine just a string of bones that are all connected. My problem is that I needed each bone to rotate on its own but when I rotate one bone, it rotates all bones in front of it. I thought I could control that by simply doing a relative z axis rotation in the vertex of the spline ik path that’s closest to the bone, but then I discovered that there’s no local z rotation for some reason. However, just by accident, I found that there’s an “Inherit Rotation” option for each bone. When I de-checked that option for each bone in the chain, every bone in the chain rotated on its own without rotating all the bones in-front of it, thus indirectly solving my problem.
I don’t really think that’s angry at all, I actually visually observed that many other questions were being answered before mine even though I put a lot of effort into being specific and providing detail. But in any case, this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been disappointed by this website either, as with many people.
clockmender is right, other threads being answered does not mean someone has a solution for your problem. It is indeed quite specific ! 
Glad you found a solution, however I would be careful with unchecking inherit rotation, as it makes manipulating the entirety of an armature more difficult (since children bones won’t follow the root bone anymore). Have you tried toka’s splineIK ? It’s pretty cool…