I am trying to make a creature like a chinese dragon. To animate flying around, I’d like the body to follow a curve. The curve modifier is perfect for this, as I can keyframe the y axis and the animations look very smooth. However, I do not want the legs and head to be horribly disfigured by the curve modifier, so they must be on a seperate mesh, but I still need the root of each to follow the body. The armature for the legs needs to stay in the same place on the body and needs to rotate according to the polygons where it appears connected.
The only working solution I’ve come up with is adding a small tri next to the body, parenting an empty to the tri, and using a Child Of constraint on the highest bone of the leg to parent it to the empty. (I’ve tried just ChildOfing the bone straight to the tri or other polygons using vertex groups, but I always get strange roll rotations.)
This works, but it has one major shortcoming: the legs just clip into the body since they are a seperate mesh. I’d like the legs to be flush with the body, like they would be able to if I was working with a single mesh. Through several hours of testing, I’ve hacked together a solution that parents empties to a tri on top of every vertex surrounding the leg on the body and ChildOfing a seperate bone to those empties, effectively parenting a bone to a vertex (with rotation) so I can blend these bones’ vertex groups with the leg bones. Obviously, this solution is trash, takes a lot of work, and isn’t always perfect. Is there any easier way to do what I’m trying to accomplish?
I have similar requirements for vehicles travelling along a curved road. So the solution I use is to have a curve for the path, then to have simple plane objects on the path using Curve Modifiers, then to have drivers keeping the various planes the required distance apart.
Then I parent the Armature Object to the principle plane, so it always stays put. Then I use Damped Track constraints to point the other bones at the supplementary planes so the whole thing stays in line. With me so far, good, there are examples on my website here that you can work through - the various vehicle tutorials. I know they are not dragons, but to a rigger, a dragon behaves near enough the same as an articulated lorry…
By now you should have realised that you have to rig the dragon, not difficult and I can walk you through this if you have never done it.
Otherwise, post a blend file with the armature/mesh in it and I can take a look at it.
Wow, after looking through your vehicle tutorial, I must say this appears to be an excellent solution! However, while running through it, I have found that simply parenting objects (the armature and the empty) does not move them along the curve with the planes, only back and forth along the x axis. After some more fiddling around, I have found that this is because the curve modifier does not change the position of the mesh object, just the vertices. Am I missing something?
Also, concerning the rigging of the dragon, I was really hoping I would not need to rig the body, but if I want the legs physically connected to it, I must. I have a bit of experience in rigging, but I’m not sure how to rig something where the end result is a glorified cylinder.
It is only a crude model and rig due to lack of time, but should give you some pointers. I did a simple “Automatic Weights” parent, so you sometimes have to clean these up with a bit of weight painting.
Cheers, Clock.
PS. Just run the animation to see how it works, all the good stuff is on the hidden layer…
