Newbie Rigging a Personal Character

dang87

I'm pretty green to the whole rigging thing, I've done it very seldomly. The big issue right now is the cables and how to rig them to follow the arm automatically. This may be something needed to be done manually? I'm not sure, rigging and skinning is still fairly new to modeler like me.

In the end, this will be put into Unreal 4. Possible 2-3 dynamic poses (ie; attack pose and such) and if all goes well, an idle animation (ie: standing, possibly a boxer type stance animation). I've been searching the net but haven't found what I'm looking for or maybe just over looked not knowing. Any advice or point in the right direction would be appreciated. I will continue to search the web. Thank you for taking the time to look and put in feedback!

Low Poly with Normals

BiPed rig with cable bones following as a whole problem

CAT rig exploration copying the previous BiPed rig

Gif animation with issue going on. This is NOT what I want it to do. Think Marvel's Apocalypse and how his cables attach to him, that's the result I want to achieve.

Rmunday

Using an IK chain I think is the effect you are going for, not used max to rig in years so this video will probably explain it better than I could!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhb6N3IWf58

dang87

User from Unreal forums posted this so it may be useful: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/z-spline2bone

Archanex

I think if it were me, I'd try using a whole lot less bones. I think clever skin weighting between the spine and the forearm on the cables will go pretty far, and then maybe have one extra floating joint (per arm) that's positioned in the middle of each tube that is parented to the forearm that you can animate for whenever you get into poses that need adjusting. I don't know of an automatic way to make it work without scripting or dynamics though. Hope that helps

dang87

I feel the IK chain showed in the video will work just needs some tweaking. I agree with the less bones will make it more manageable so I reduced the amount. I'm not too sure what you mean by the extra floating joint. Are you talking about a bone sticking out of the forearm and ending where the tube/cable starts? Sorry for the lack of knowledge on this just feels over my head at the moment.

Archanex

by a floating joint, I meant a bone that is roughly in the middle of the tube and parented to the forearm, then you'd just translate/rotate that "floating joint" as needed

dang87

Here is my current rig setup, are you saying add the floating joint here?

Archanex

Yes

dang87

So that link would be skinned to the whole cable then???
This is how everything is looking right now just issues with forearm twisting at the moment could be a skinning issue since I'm not quite done with that.

Archanex

Hey.... just so it's clear, I was saying you should get rid of all the extra bones you added on the cables and replace them with ONE single bone for each side, it's going to make your life a whole lot easier. 

Unless you want those cables to tie somebody up or something crazy, I'd look for ways to reduce your joint count

dang87

Oh, sorry, I didn't get that until now. So that one bone would be skinned to a good portion of the cable but linked to the forearm so when it moves the cable would come along. My concern was would the cable bend and move correctly but I'll have to try that out and see how the cable interact when his arm move forward and back.

dang87

Yeah, that single bone thing is alot simplier than having all bones to keep up with than I thought. A couple of stretching issues near the end of the cord that could be fixed with a bone or two and some skinning. Thanks Archanex!