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Winding up a fishing reel, expressions help?
Hello forum,
I’m currently animating a fisherman perpetually reeling in a big fish. All of his limbs are in pieces (am going for a cut-out style) and I have the general flow of the body downpat. The problem is with his right arm, which is the arm winding up the fishing rod’s reel.
I tried following the tutorial on pistons and cranks:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/ebberts_dan/expressions.php
which is pretty awesome except my piston/upper arm keeps getting yanked out of its socket)Ideally, I’d like to control the reel handle by rotation, with the arm straightening and bending to follow the spinning handle, and the upper arm’s anchor point staying firmly in place.
I’d also like to be able to move the fishing rod backwards and forwards and have the arm straighten and bend accordingly, with the hand remaining on the handle.
If I was doing this in 3Ds max, I’d create an IK control for the fishing rod (like a tendon running from the hand to the shoulder), how I wish After Effects CS4 had an equivalent…
Answers and enlightenment would be much appreciated 🙂
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4 Replies
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This might help:
https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/ik.html
I think you’d just need to tie the hand effector to the position of the reel handle with an expression (which would need to include a horizontal offset).
Dan
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Thanks for the speedy reply 🙂
The IK tute is awesome! A lot of the math stuff went over my head but I understood the basic concept of what it was doing and my arm is now fully IK’ed 😀
I ended up not using the limb IK code for the wrist though, instead I parented its rotation to the Hand effector’s rotation. I found it gave me more control to make it look like it’s gripping the reel’s handle (when I manually animate it).
However, I only did this because I’m still unsure of how to “tie the hand effector to the position of the reel handle with an expression (which would need to include a horizontal offset). Perhaps your piston and crank tute has the answer to this one.. i see similarities 🙂 I’ll be back!
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I tried applying the piston and crank tutorial to the fishing reel scenario (with the reel handle being the wheel, the hand being the crank, and the piston being the hand effector) but ended up making a giant mess of things 🙁
my anchor points and parents for the IK system oppose the piston/crank system! I can’t figure out how to use both systems together…
Any ideas.. ? The manually animated motion looks sort of awful unless i animate it frame by frame (which i’m trying to avoid as the bosses will probably shower me with changes).
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Do you mean that you didn’t apply the foot-leveling rotation expression to the hand? I think that might be what would make this work. That, in conjuction with a null parented to the handle of the reel and the hand effector linked to that with an expression. Hard to describe, but not tough to set up.
I hope you’re making progress!
Dan
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