[MAYA] Trying to make a whip-sword, having problems with rigging the rope, please help!
polycounter lvl 5
I'm trying to make a sword that can extend out to be a whip, and I'm having issues getting the rope bits of it to work properly. I don't have a lot of experience rigging so I'm pretty sure I'm doing something wrong here.
Here's a picture of what it looks like right now when it's extended. In this picture I've bound the skeleton to the geometry and it's in the bind pose. I haven't done much with the paint weights yet. Currently I have joints at the start of the rope, the middle of the rope, the end of the rope, and then it goes back up into the start of the next rope.
In this next picture, I've rotated the joint for the first rope middle section, then the next rope's start and middle section to give a rough example of what I'm trying to do here. The segments are fine, although I might want some rotation later, but the rope looks really unnatural, I'm wondering if I need to do something magical with the paint weights or if there's something really obvious here I'm overlooking. Maybe it's something to do with IK handles?
The next picture is what happens if I try to do the same thing with IK handles attached to the starts and ends of both rope joints. This is a lot worse, the rope still doesn't look good and now I can't get the segments positioned how I'd like them to be positioned.
This next picture (nay, MASTERPIECE), is a very rough idea of how I want the rope to be interacting with this model. I don't want it to sag down from gravity, I want it to stand up on it's own like how a thick wire might be able to and be able to rotate in 360 degrees.
Once I get all this figured out, I want to set up a separate control that is in change of extracting and retracting the rope. I want to be able to animate this thing like a lasso.
If someone could help me with this I'd really appreciate it, thanks!
Here's a picture of what it looks like right now when it's extended. In this picture I've bound the skeleton to the geometry and it's in the bind pose. I haven't done much with the paint weights yet. Currently I have joints at the start of the rope, the middle of the rope, the end of the rope, and then it goes back up into the start of the next rope.
In this next picture, I've rotated the joint for the first rope middle section, then the next rope's start and middle section to give a rough example of what I'm trying to do here. The segments are fine, although I might want some rotation later, but the rope looks really unnatural, I'm wondering if I need to do something magical with the paint weights or if there's something really obvious here I'm overlooking. Maybe it's something to do with IK handles?
The next picture is what happens if I try to do the same thing with IK handles attached to the starts and ends of both rope joints. This is a lot worse, the rope still doesn't look good and now I can't get the segments positioned how I'd like them to be positioned.
This next picture (nay, MASTERPIECE), is a very rough idea of how I want the rope to be interacting with this model. I don't want it to sag down from gravity, I want it to stand up on it's own like how a thick wire might be able to and be able to rotate in 360 degrees.
Once I get all this figured out, I want to set up a separate control that is in change of extracting and retracting the rope. I want to be able to animate this thing like a lasso.
If someone could help me with this I'd really appreciate it, thanks!
Replies
then when you smooth, after skinning with a smooth modifier or by pressing 3 it will look better.
its important to use Dual quaternion as the skinning method to avoid the tube collapsing at the joint.
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I decided to make the whole thing a bit longer. This took me some time since I'm using multiple different rope geometries and I wanted to make sure everything lined up perfectly. I now have 6 joints per rope including the starting and ending joints, the rope geometry has 10 subdivisions along the x-axis.
I fixed up the segment's paint weight again so that the rope joints wouldn't affect their geometry. I'm a lot happier with these results, even though it looks like they still need to be touched up a bit in terms of paint weights. I feel like it's going to take some time to make a rig to properly retract all of this as well, even though I already know these segments line up perfectly.
I can still do better, it's just a matter of how.
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That dual quaternion skinning method is definitely useful to know, it seems to make the skinning a lot better for this kind of thing.
This question may or may not be related, is it possible to add dynamic effects like gravity to tubes that are made with polygonal geometry like this? I think it would be neat if I could have it extend out and then relax, although maybe I can mimick the effect by doing some kind of a duplicate mimic with different effects.
I'm still new to working with dynamics, so my mind is sort of racing with ideas.