Row boat key bones config?

NAIMA

Hello I wanted to make a viking longship with animated rows but I dunno how to setup the skeleton structure , how can I organize so that all rows move almoust in stnc with a center if rotation in their middle lenght?
Thanks fir any ideas and sugestion.

JohnnyRaptor

First thing that came to my head was a joint at the rotation pivot, look at constrained to a joint at the handle/grip. Moving the grip joint should give you the paddle behavior. Also if you have several in a row, you can group them and they should all move in sync.

Kurt Russell Fan Club

You can just skin and animate one with a single bone, and then in your game duplicate the oar a number of times.

If you need them to look out of sync, you can make a longer animation with a few strokes and play them at different phases and with slight offsets.

NAIMA

Ok but I am not sure how draw the bone system to support it ?

Kurt Russell Fan Club

If you're doing just one oar as an instanced, animated mesh then you'll need one bone. The pivot should be where the oar pivots (where it touches the ship, generally) and it will point in one direction. Attach all verts to that one oar. e.g.



If you want a whole system, you can make one parent bone for the ship and a bone for each oar. If your engine supports bone translations then you can just do that, otherwise if your engine only allows bones to rotate then you will need to have one bone coming from the boat bone to meet the pivot point of each oar. e.g.

NAIMA

Ok thanks I will try that .