Sorry for the long post…
I am trying to rig up a tube in blender2.56. The tube is a flexible coupling between to fixed tubes which can move independently–like a garden hose.
I think spline ik is the way to go. What I would like to do is be able control the tube by the position and normal of the center of each end. I have already been through this tutorial on spline IK:
http://users.xplornet.com/~gimble/blender/tutorials/spline_ik/spline_ik.htm
It was very good and I have a great octopus arm. I realize that tube and octopus arms are very similar, but the one difference is the tube shape is an .stl file that I have imported and it is important that the imported shape is exact.
In the spline IK tutorial all of pieces (spline, armature, mesh) are all modeled along the x-axis. Is there a way to build some organic shape spline and armature and then hook it up to the tube the way it already is. (As opposed to building a tube on the x-axis and trying to match it or something.)
Thanks