Making Tassets Work Without Physics

Hey, so I’m working on a sort of android knight character model inspired by character designs by Tsutomu Nihei and Keith Thompson, and part of a traditional knight’s armor that I want to include is a piece called a “tasset,” which protects the area from the hips to the upper thighs.


Their location on this model in particular are pointed out here using turquoise arrows.

Due to their “flap-like” nature, they would, at least in theory, only move when in contact with the leg (or when acted upon by gravity, but I’m not going to worry about that). Obviously, with them just being static objects parented to the cuirasse, they don’t move at all, so when I move the leg, the following occurs:


You can see where the leg clips through the tassets circled in turquoise.

I could do something where I put a “copy rotation” constraint on them, but this is sort of a cop-out technique and won’t achieve the desired effect.

I could also bite the bullet and apply some sort of physics to them, but I want the tassets to move in real time with the legs.

Is there a way, using only constraints and/or rigging, to make the tassets only move with the thighs while they are touching them?

I’ve worked out part of the solution using copy rotation ;). Its the same idea behind shape key drivers: add a driver, edit the F-curves to specify how much the leg moves before the tasset begins to move.

I’ve worked this out for a side tasset. I don’t yet know if it will work for the front (or rear), need to do some testing.
Also don’t forget “offset” gives you manual control for those extra tweaks.

tasset-side.blend (485 KB)