Hey all so I need some help with a rig I am trying to make. The idea is to be able to animate a cartoon straw sucking down a big gulp of water.
I want to do this with an armature in Blender because the final animation needs top be imported into a game engine. I have basic rigging knowledge and feel like I am just missing something and need some explaining.
I want to be able to animate the X and Z scale of a bone while it effects the other two bones connected to it in the chain. I want something like a gradual fall-off on either end as well. Ideally I can animate the bulge with a controller of some sort.
I have attached a sketch of what I am kinda trying to do, thanks in advance for any insights!
Hey thanks for responding! This is super helpful and totally looks what I am trying to do. However I did mention in my original post that I am using an armature because I need to import this animation into a game engine, specifically UE5.
I could with this method bake the animation for every frame, which isn’t the end of the world, but an armature would make the FBX file a lot lighter.
So still if there is a solution that works on an armature that is what I am looking for.
I did an example with automatic weights, limited Y scale (local) and removed inherit scale for all bones. I know it is bad but it is the only way i can think without any modifiers, i hope it helps a little, maybe with more bones.
So something I have found interesting that translates over to UE5 is many of the bone constraints. Do you think there is a way to accomplish something smoother like this that could involve bone constraints?
Not necessarily useless! This is with shape keys? Im fairly certain shape keys can translate over to UE5 as they are key frames directly on the mesh which I have to imagine UE5 understands. I could probably make shape keys like this with the cast modifier like @RSEhlers mentioned earlier by baking the modifier into every frame of the animation.
Again it’s just less flexible and a heavier file, but if that ends up being the solution that’s fine.
Thanks for thinking about this and helping out I do aprecciate it even if its not a 1:1 fix or anything.
I am glad this helps. In case the file does not make it obvious: I created each key by proportional scaling an edge loop around the straw. Each shapekey has 3 keyframes only with values 0,1,0 (starting with key1 at first frame ) and the next keys’ first keyframe is exactly on the second keyframe of the previous key.
EDIT: You can move KeyX keyframes to the left by X-1 frames and it looks more smooth (X represents the order number of the shapekey).
