Hi everyone,
I got a big challenge in front of me, wanting to animate a man rowing a boat with oars. I enclose a screen shot that illustrates the problem: the center of the oar mesh is where the row lock is(B) - but the end of the oar(A) is supposed to follow the arm/hand movements of the character.
Does anyone have any help or good advice here? I supposed some kind of tracking is required?? I cannot say that I am a particularly skilled user of Blender when it comes to complex animations like this, so please explain yourself clearly. Thank you in advance.
PS I have searched this site and Google thoroughly but rowing animation oars is certainly not a well covered topic.
So, fist things first… The oars should drive the arms of the rower sine there pivot point is known and fixed - the rowlock, the oar then rotates about this point in possibly all three of its axes.
The rowers hands are static on the oar, and the rest of the arm, shoulder and back move relative to the position of the rowers butt on the seat. For simplicity you could animate the movement of the back/shoulders separately.
So you need an Armature with a bone for the oar, then a target bone at the hand position, parented to the oar. The arm would be a two, or three link IK chain with the IK target being the target bone on the oar, move the oar, the arms move correctly.
So, question, is what I’ve written understandable to you and have you used Armatures and IK chains before, if not you need to let me know and I can build a sample rig for you. You should also get your head around Armatures, with some manual, or 'net article reading first!
Thank you SO much! Clockmender, yes I do have some experience with Armatures and IK - and I understand your explanation - I never thought of taking the starting points in the oars but know that you said it, it makes good sense to me I´l try it out
Hi again Clock, I think I´m almost there! Please take a look at the picture.
picture A :An armature controls the oar and the man´s hand has been connected to that armature - everything works as it should. Thanks a lot again for your advice!
picture B: But then when I thought that I had finished the job, it turned out, that when the boat is moving forward(I connected all items to an armature below the boat) the oar mesh doesn´t follow or they move in different directions - upwards and outwards. Picture D shows the oar mesh that is of course attached to the armature that controls the oar-
I tried connect it to the Armature boat.001 too but that doesn´t help. Since the oar´s armature is connected to Armature boat.001 I would suppose that the oar mesh itself would not need to be…
Are you able to see something that I can´t or suggest what to do…
Hi, I am away this weekend with only my phone, so can’t do much. Ideally you should use one armature for everything, not separate ones. Try building one armature for everything, just watch your IK chain lengths, as this can cause problems if not correct.
I’ll look in again on Monday and see how it looks, multiple armature for one model is not really a good idea though…
Cheers Clock.
PS. Make sure you have no unapplied rotations or scales on any mesh or armature.
One other thing, you might have a dependency loop… run Blender from a terminal and see if there are any such error messages, they don’t always come up in the info window…