IK rig with a flex rubber joint

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Ok I may have bit off more than I can chew. Thinking that instead of creating a bunch of internal hinge joints for the legs of my spider camera bot I would just make a rubber type hinge cover that hides the joint areas. However in doing this it will need to flex and bend while the rest of the armature is just a standard IK rig with a root and body bone. I have attached a .blend file to show what I am trying to achieve but my rigging and setting up isn’t up to par when including outside meshes into the rig (like the flex joints).
I have tried just using a soft body and cloth for the joint and doing a plethora of parenting to try and get the joint to follow the armature of the legs but it never really did.

Layer 1 is a simple single leg to body with the two leg pieces and the flex joint piece. On layer 3 I have the look of the total rig. Thank you for any help in trying to figure this out. I am hoping to finally complete something from scratch to finish rigged and ready to animate.

FlexJointHelp.blend (519.7 KB)

2

Ok I guess I should simplify my question. How would I go about getting the rubber joint in the middle to bend when the leg bends and move with the rest of the rig properly?

3

parent the mesh legs to the leg bones using bone parenting. Parent the joint using weights.

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4

@stilltrying Thank you. Guess my noob rigging brain was overthinking it and was thinking it was way more involved than it was. I appreciate the shove back into the right direction. Got it working now. Again thank you for helping.

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