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Seeking alternative method for rigging a non-standard character
We have a robot model with no legs or any need to animate the eyes and just basic body Vibrate tags or Sound Effector for a simple mouth sync-up to an audio file, but we’re having difficulty setting up the arms for character animation, which have floating sections (3 fingers, hand, forearm, and shoulder) that do not touch each other. The arms were delivered to us as a single polygon object and I’ve since split them up into separate objects with the goal of getting some lifelike, independent arm movement at least, since I don’t believe deforming the mesh would be a good look. I’ve tried making an IK Chain out of the sections but I may be going about it wrong. Seems there’s something fundamental I’m missing here that’s hopefully right in front of our collective noses. I’d like to avoid having to animate position and rotation on each of those sections manually since there must be a way to have them all interact as a unit. Any suggestions?
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5 Replies
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If I read you correctly, rather than using an IK directly on the geo, create a joint based rig, at least one joint per piece of geo, parent the geo to the joints (parent/child or use constraints) then use IK on the joint chains. Doing it this way also lets you make the ‘bones’ stretch while not deforming the geo, so the spacing between the bits of geo move apart as expected. I can give you an example if you need it
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Andy, thank-you so much for your super tip. After trying everything else, I eventually came to the same conclusion. And yes, I would very much like to take a look at an example, if you don’t mind. That would be a great help.
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Hi, my apologies, late working etc, then when I get home I remember I wiped my mac recently so didn’t have C4d! So, this is made with the R23 trial. Very basic but I guess you can see what I’m getting at. The stretch parameter is within the IK tag. You would also need to add maybe more joints and constraints to allow the IK target to rotate the wrist, or more joints to have more granular control of each section. Shout back if I can help further
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Andy, I really appreciate your assistance in working through this area of C4D that is still not my strong suit after 11 years of experience with the program. That setup is ideal for our robot arm motion and I suppose I’d just replace the cylinders and spheres with sections of the robot arm and then keyframe the Joint 2 Goal. Guess I could just AutoKeyframe the motion and save basic moves that I could copy and paste onto different timelines as needed. Thanks again for help taking this project to the next level!
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No problem Ron, glad I could help, good luck with your projects
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