Is there a simple way to create inertia for a single bone in any sense? Sometimes when I make a cyclic parent setup, it creates this delay in the animation, but sometimes it actually almost looks good, but I imagine there is a physics way to do it?
If you mean you create a “cyclic dependancy loop”, you should definitely not do this as it will really screw things up, if you want a delayed reaction to something moving for something else, you should keyframe this, or use drivers, or other methods. I can’t tell what you are doing since you have not posted a blend file…
Cheers, Clock.
You can use a string of edges with soft body physics, parent an empty to each vertex and constrain bones to the empties. You can find detailed tuts on youtube
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That’s what I normally try but there’s two issues with that.
One: it doesn’t work for only a single vertex because if you have no pinning, you will never have precise control over the position, and if you do have pinning in the one vertex, then you can’t have any inertia.
Two: If you use more than one vertex, then the bone would need to be parented to an empty/vertex that is displaced from the root of where you actually want the bone to be centered in the first place and if you don’t, then the bone will have to be dragged from the pinned vertex instead of pushed if you make the pinning low enough to enact inertia, otherwise if will appear like it has a weird nonsensical springiness like a perpendicular blade of grass.
Also, why would you recommend empties when bones are way better? You can’t reset empty positions except to the world origin.
Yeah that’s more of a workaround anyway. Blender doesn’t have proper tools for this so it’s always better to go and animate overlaps by hand (provided you’ve got the time).
You’re right, bones are the way to go, except in this case : you can’t vertex-parent a bone, unfortunately. If you try it, it’ll parent the entire armature object instead…, so the only way is to create empties to hold the positions and constrain the bones to those empties.