Questions about animating a missile's folding fins.

Hello there people !

I’m trying to animate various fins on an 9M113 Konkurs ATGM and I’ve run into sum small issues. First of all ,let me help you help me by explaining the situation and giving you some pics of it. So here is the missile and the parts to be animated:




Also ,here’s a test rig for the flexible fins and a real life taste of how they look while unfolding (Chinese variant):


Now ,although I’m pretty happy with the way the test rig behaves ,I don’t really know how to animate it. Each bone in the skeleton should increase its angle with the preceding one on each frame so that the fin unfolds smoothly and naturally when the missile is fired. Which brings the question ,what’s the most effective ,smooth way to animate this inside blender ? Also ,you’ve probably noticed that I need 4 of those rear tentacly fins ,4 of the frontal solid fins and the 2 flaps at the very rear ,but until now I had no success in finding a way to mirror entire rigs and make arrays with them. Finally ,I need to merge all individual animations into 1 to export them along with the mesh to Unreal Engine 4 ,but I haven’t figured out how to put them all on one skeleton.

So that’s all about the issues I’m having currently and any advice you could provide would be warmly welcome !

Thank you for your time and have a nice day !

since your making this for a game engine this may not help as I don’t thing that Blenders game engine handles Constraints at this point…

but here is the way I would do it… just using a rotation constraint connected to a rotation curl bone…

FinBend_Norv_003.blend (948 KB)

maybe there is some way to do this in the programming…

also if your just going to animate it in Blender using the above method…
note that you only need to one Rotation Curl control bone (the one I named ‘bender’) to use as the control for all the Fins… This way just move that one bone and all the fins should curl…

Wow ,that was much simpler than I made it to be in my mind. Thanks for the help ! One thing I noticed though is that you made this rig one step more advanced than I did. Each horizontal edge loop’s direction seems to bisect the angle of the 2 bones affecting it. Could you please enlighten me on how you managed such an effect ? I struggled for quite some time until finally giving up on this effort. Automatic weights and manual painting created unwanted behaviors and I ended up using empty groups and just binding each horizontal edge loop to a bone with 100% influence.

I ended up using empty groups and just binding each horizontal edge loop to a bone with 100% influence.

That’s my recomended method especially for anything that is of a Mechanical Hard Surface nature…
but it works for organic models also…

go here for this excellent video on the subject…

Skip to about 9 or 10 minutes in