Creating a floating halo

Hello!

A project that I’m currently involved with, calls for a glowing halo to float above a person’s head as if on the end of a piece of metal wire. I have tracked the head. Ideally the halo would lag behind slightly and wobble in order to create the illlusion of momentum.

I first thought about using the action editor in dope sheet to copy the location and rotation of my tracked head and “pasting” it on the halo mesh. This is otherwise fine but it requires me to animate the lagging and wobbling by hand by the use of the graph editor and adding keyframes. This is time-consuming and produces mediocre results at best. I wonder if there is some way of using blender’s physics simulation features to automate this process?

Cheers!

Quick and dirty way to simulate halo lagging is to use Physics / Soft Body. Simply parent a head bone to halo, a torus object. So when head moves halo comes with it. Make halo a soft body. Make sure Soft Body Goal is checked. And reduce the Mass value for quick start. Here you can see how halo is “lagging” head tilt movement:

http://i1135.photobucket.com/albums/m626/cabby24/Blender%20Pics%202012/hailo.png

Play with Soft Body settings to behave correctly for you.