I am looking too create a tentacle that will move dynamically when i move the main (top) controller. In other words, impart gravity to the IK chain. Is this possible in blender?
Kind of like this. Notice how the tentacles dynamically move
The easiest way to set up a moderately physical IK chain would actually be with spline IK, because its easy to set curve objects up with softbody physics:
Blender 2.8 dependency improvements make this much simpler than it used to be. The curve is parented to the root bone and give a soft body modifier, with physics tuned on the physics tab. One handle is given a weight of 1 and the other a weight of 0 in the sidebar-- this corresponds to the physics goal weight, where I set the default to 1.0. The end bone is given a spline IK constraint targeting the curve, of appropriate length (here, everything but the root.)
You can make a tentacle that’s both kind of physical and kind of animatable pretty easily by hooking the “tip” handle of the curve without any falloff and giving it a non-zero weight.
bandages - thank you so much for the explanation and screen shot. I will try this and let you know how it goes. Thanks again!
You might want to look into Jiggle Armature 2 or the like. I know there’s several on this forum. I personally used Jiggle Armature, though back in 2.7x.