Chain Rigging?

Slipstream

I have this sword concept:

and this model:


And I want to make it so that the sheathe is hanging off the character's shoulder. My initial thought was that I'd rig the chain with bones, but then I realized that I'd get all sorts of wonky deformations that shouldn't be going on with metal objects.

Does anyone have a good way of handling this?

FatAssasin

Well, there's a reason that most characters have the sword strapped tightly across their backs. It's a hell of a lot easier to work with. Is this for a game or pre-rendered cinematic?

Slipstream

Its for a game, and that's true. I just didn't want to abandon the concept without a fight =P

Jesse Moody

i would say you are gonna have to make the chain part of the character. I don't do too much animation these days but I think that would be the easiest way to do it.

Anyways I'll be watching this to see what anyone else has to say.

If it was for a FMV then you can rig things with rigid surface and stuff so they don't deform and just have it all simulated. It adds time to rendering but the results are pretty nice.

Hito

I think your best bet is lniking the chain links into a heirarchy (you can use 1 bone for each link and just parent the bone to the links), apply a spline IK to it with a few control nodes. Hide that on a layer. Make your animations. then unhide the chain and key it to match your animations.

You could experiemnt with linking the spline-IK control nodes to a cloth sim, though that might take alot of time to tweak

animatr

(in response to using dynamic rigid bodies)

you could still do that in maya at least, and just have the joints constrained to the dynamic objects, then bake. however, you would want 1 joint per chain link and that could be expensive

Rob Galanakis

I'm sure there's a way to do it once you would hand it to programmers who could figure out something with physics and joints. I would say, failing that complicated and engine/physics API-dependent solution, just use bones, be careful about the deformation of the chain links, and fudge it.

aesir

As long as the chain isnt bending a lot, bones will work fine and the deformation of the chain links will not be very noticable. I've seen it done before. However, if you want the chain flipping around and curlingg around shit and other crazy things, youre gonna have to do something a bit more complicated.

Geezus

I had a similar topic going on a few months back. The info helped me a bit, it may serve useful to you:
http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php...true#Post192411

Slipstream

The bone and path deform method got me more or less the same result, but I went with path deform because its simpler to edit.
I'd experiment with it a bit more, and see if I could gt a more procedural and easily edited version, but I have about two weeks to get this project done and I'm more or less still in the gate.

Anyway, thanks everyone. Getting this figured out is a real load off