Armature question

Support Basics & Interface
1

I am having two issues that I think are fundamentally the same problem.

I have a skeleton for an camel that I am trying to make poseable. I have set up an IKA chain in the leg that runs from:
Thigh -> Calf -> Foot -> Null Bone. The null bone has an IKA solver constraint that keeps it locked in on a bone I called Foot_IK (I used a bone rather than an emty so I could see things a little better). The Thigh is parented to the hip, although I broke the IKA chain there. I also have a five segmented tail that is set up in a very similar fashion.

This is pretty conventional stuff from my reading of the various tutorials.

My issue is that the IK solver is putting the bulk of the motion in the roots of the chain. E.g., If I pick the foot off the ground, it is almost entirely coming from the hip. If I try to ‘swish’ the tail, the motion is all up at the root of the tail.

I need to tell Blender to emphasize some bones over others, but I cannot figure out how to do this. I’ve fiddled with things like distance and weight, but I don’t think my fiddling had any effect.

I saw a reference to the ‘realtime’ button, and it sure has a lot of scary buttons, but I can’t seem to find how I could set weight or range of motion with these. Further, I don’t know if they are appropriate for general animation use.

I would be grateful for any help or links.

-Andy

2

it’s probably too late to do that, but armature reacts in a more believable fashion if the joints in your model are initially half-bend. See the Blendo model at the Blenderchar for a good example of that. http://blenderchar.weirdhat.com/

Martin

3

Thanks for the reply. I found that by giving the foot a bit of pre-rotation in pose mode, I could get the IK engine to do the poses that I want.

My tail was a different problem all together. Somehow I had managed to get the bones so that their axis were not aligned. I remember reading something about this being an IK requirement. At any rate, I recreated the tail with correctly oriented bones, and now it works much better.

-Andy