Peeeps! i need some help. I have been busy trying to create a curve that takes on the different stages of a breaking wave.
With success I made the shape keys and have them animated in a timeline. However I would like to use a bones rotation to drive the animation rather than scrub through the timeline. This way I can rig many together and create a wave rig. I have priovided my curve and a bone. If anyone can provide assistance it would be much appreciated.
wave helpo.blend (1.1 MB)
Took a look at your file. How exactly did you animate this? I don’t see any literal shapekeys (via assign curve shapekey addon) or any significant modifiers; it appears to have keyframed control+handle position, but that’s not something native to Blender… Not unless it’s some new feature that I never noticed.
But even though I don’t know how you’ve animated this, I can see that you can’t represent the animation onto a single bone. You would need many bones.
As far as I can count, you’ve got 27 sets of XYZ keyframes, 9 controls and 18 handles. So you’d need 27 bones to fully represent your animation. (It’s possible that not all keyed channels are important though.)
If I had an animation in this style, and I wanted to get it onto bones, what I might do is to make a string of 27 verts, assign each to an individual vertex group, and then use GN to assign the positions of the verts to the positions of controls and handles. Then, I could use copy location constraints, with vertex groups specified, to have the bones acquire the positions of those vertices; and then, I could “bake action” with visual keying and clear constraints. That way, my 27 bones would have the same animated positions as my 27 controls+handles.
27 bones would be irritating to animate when I made a bunch of waves, so what I might do is give those bones “action” bone constraints referencing my baked action. Then I could use some other control bone to scrub through that action and just hide the 27 deforming bones.
Thank you bandages. Yes I understand what’s you are saying. Yes the control points were animated with bones that were connected to each control point via drivers and then the bones were deleted once the animation was finished. I can provide that file after work in about 6 hours. I will have a try to implement what you have suggested and report back. I work a lot so my responses can be delayed by a day. Thankyou for your response . Much appreciated !
if they were animated via bones, why are you now trying to turn that animation back into bones? Why did you delete the bones? You already had a bone based animation.
I was not going to turn them back into bones, rather I was going to implement what you were suggesting to the bones I originally had. thankyou for your response.
