Hello everyone,
I’ve reached a point where I think I’ve exhausted my options and need help on a good solution. I’m trying to make an arm squash and stretch in such a way where the mesh does not get deformed in extreme ways. Delder will be pulling objects out of his eye as well as picking things up using the squash and stretch. The arm movement would be similar to a noodle in movement but a rubber band when stretched. There is a brief animation showing some of the squashing and stretching. However whenever I get to trying to reach his upper eye area the mesh distortion is too great. I hoped a multi ik stretch bone setup would solve this, however, it did not help entirely.
I studied the ludwig spine rig extensively and made a modified version of this(Thanks Calvin for the scaled down version). My arm rig involves a two ik setup that has two red bones (top and mid) that are parents to the two separate strings of stretch bones. Two green bones(ikarm and ikm) are ik targets for the stretch bones. Scalearm is a yellow bone that is a shape driven ipo made as a test to try and offset extreme distortion when moving the arm. When scaling the scalearm bone, it makes part of the arm larger. The problem is that the ipo driven shapekey distorts the mesh in a way that makes the armature less usable.
An example of what my ideal rig would be like is this cat in his demo reel:
The problem file is here:
http://www.pagodaproductions.com/error/Armtest01.blend
Here are threads that discussed things similar to this before:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=67621
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=68545
Thanks for your help in advance!
Mr. R