Im new to the forum and this is my first post,
Hope its understandable and somebody can help me out .
I created a character to use in UE4.
Everything just worked fine.
Now I want to add a chain around the torso of the character in blender using rigid body to
make the chain follow the silhouette of the character .
How I should go about rigging this correctly or what settings should I use to make sure the chain
actually acts as a chain when I animate the character .
(to be clear , I don’t want to animate the chain separately but it should follow the moves of
the character , of course this doesn’t work when I add with automatic paint since then the
chain would stretch and not actually move like a chain)
Make one chain link and duplicate the vertices in EDIT mode to make a second, which you rotate so they are 90 degrees out of phase. Make sure they are interlocked.
Add a Curve object - bezier or NURB - to be the path of the chain.
Add an Array modifier to the chain object to get the required number of links, set the offset so the second link is in the correct place to the first. Add a Curve modifier after the Array Modifier with the curve as the Target object, your chain will now follow the curve profile.
Parent the curve object to your characters Torso bone- as a first step.
Now comes the harder part. In order to modify the shape of the curve you must use Hook modifiers - so you add these in EDIT mode for the curve and they require a series of targets. You then assign the vertices of the curve to your Hook objects.
So now you can move the Hook Modifier target objects and the curve will deform, this is the only practical way I know to deform a curve.
You then need the curve length to stay as is - or the chain might stretch or shrink. You may notice that if you move the target at the end of the curve to stretch it that the chain stays intact, but no longer reaches the end of the curve - this is good as it makes your life easier.
If not you can use a connected set of bones as the Target objects, but make them a continuos IK chain - that way the curve length can be kept as is.
Finally then you would break the curve to torso bone parent and parent the targets to the torso bone. You can then animate these targets separately or in conjunction with the Torso bones.
Good Luck - this is not an easy animation I have to say and I don’t know if all this will transfer to the Unity engine. If not, we will have to look at a different approach.