Animating Metal Folds

HashBrownHamish

I'm making a piece that has metal sheets that should fold based on the angle the head is looking at. It sort of works similar to plate armor such as this.




Now i haven't done any animation ever and i just want to make this so it can be animated in the future. What precautions should i take modelling this? I made each sheet that should fold in detached and separate from the main head piece

Moosebish

Your description is pretty vague. But there are multiple ways of doing this.

If you aren't working with any joint constraints, you could easily set each plate to a bone, then manipulate them using driven keys...

.Wiki

I would create a null (or call it bone) for each metalplates.

On the underlaying character mesh i would create point clusters for each polygon loop. The nulls can be constrained to the polygon loops so they will move when the character moves