Long floppy ears basic rig?

I have a problem trying to rig some floppy ears with low poly and basic rig. So 2 questions …

  1. How to make some physics
  2. Not to use anything other standard Octahedral but keep it smooth like Bendy Bones

So far the best option seems to be using Cloth and Pinning.

It needs to be for export and view in a portable 3D viewer, although no idea what yet.

Cloth physics aren’t going to work for export in most viewers. Not directly at least. Bendy bones aren’t going to work in most viewers. But if you’re low poly, neither cloth nor bendy bones would help you much anyways.

You could use rigid body physics, baked to keyframes.though.

If that’s what you want, you should first look at some rigid body tutorials and spend some time playing to get the hang of it. After that, you’d generally use a copy transforms (world->world) from your rigid bodies to your bones to transfer the physics.

Bendy bones can be simulated by just using more bones, although that gets irritating to paint, and it gets irritating to set up the physics.

If I just make some animations would it be live interpretation or key frames ? So I could do whatever I need with bendy bones etc and won’t affect the viewing.

I don’t know what you mean by “live interpretation.” If your viewer is using skeletal animation, it is both live interpretation and keyframes. It reads one or two keyframes for a bone, it figures out interpolation, then it deforms the mesh based on the bone.

There are two main kinds of animation: skeletal and vertex animation. With skeletal animation, what you’re doing is establishing bone weights and bones, but features of one animation package are not necessarily going to exist (or exist in the same way) in another animation package. That is, if you do skeletal animation, no, your bendy bones aren’t going to have the same effect in your viewer, not unless your viewer was built specifically for Blender (and why would anyone build a viewer for Blender when it is it’s own viewer?)

For vertex animation, you’re talking about baking skeletal animation to vertex positions. That can handle all sorts of things, including baked cloth physics. But there are a couple of different ways to handle vertex animation (mesh cache vs shapekeys, generally speaking) and your viewer has to support that. It probably supports some kind of shapekeys, but actually baking skeletal animation to shapekeys just to get bendy bone deformation in a different animation package would either involve scripting or a lot of tedium, and it doesn’t seem like there’s much reason to do it.

It’s not clear what you want to do, or why you want to do it; consider that Blender is a viewer, and it’s portable. If you want to make a file that you can look at in Blender, you can do anything you want.

Thanks for clearing that up, you got what I meant right.

It’s really hard to know what’s wanted I wasn’t given mush to go on, all I know is it will be animated at some point. The 3D Viewer is just so I can send a sample of the mesh and was hoping a small animation.