Grapple Hook Rig

Artwork Blender Tests
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I’ve been watching a bunch of attack on titan, so I made an ODM gear rig!

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Or, just the grappling hook part. Basically it’s driven by a spline, which has spline points hooked onto a couple bones. Scaling the bones then drives the scale of the handles, which allows you to control the spline in a neat way.

All of the main bones are parented to a bone that stretches from the grapple origin to the hook location. That makes animating the spline easy, because you can just clear location and rotation to get a straight rigid rope.

The hook itself, as well as the spline, are controlled with a driver pushing the object along the spline. it’s a child of the stretched bone, so it’s basically constrained to move from the origin to the target in a range of 0-1 local z. this directly drives where the hook is along the spline path.

I’m still a rigging beginner, so it’s fun to have an idea and build it haha

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This looks pretty neat! So is the rope mesh itself from a curve object when you say “spline” or would it be just a mesh? It reminds me of making a wavy trail behind a flying object and I used curves and empties that were hooked to the control points of the curve. Also would you happen to have any knowledge about exporting this kind of animation to something else like Sketchfab?

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here’s the file, don’t have any reason to hide it. :slight_smile:

odmgear_RIG.blend (1.2 MB)

the rope mesh itself is a curve object, with handles parented to bones on the rig. check it out, it’s actually pretty simple.

I think it’d be pretty tricky to export this to Sketchfab or anything other than baking the mesh, like with Alembic… it kinda relies on blender’s spline functions, so it would be tough to translate that.

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