Hi guys,

After some help setting up some I.K dampening.

I’ve got a character who’s dancing with a flame on the end of a stick, now the flame has 5 bones in it (this is where I want the secondary motion) but I dont know how to add dampening to more than 2 bones.  I have tried adding it to 3 before but that just made the bottom rigid with only movement in the middle.  I hope I’ve explained it clearly enough,

Any help would be appreciated,

Thanks

James.

are you trying to add it to a single ik that is over 5 bones? or each of the 5 bones that has an IK constraint on it?  you could try driving the rotation of each joint from the damp instead of useing ik.

Brad Clark
Co-Founder: Rigging Dojo-Teaching the art and science of character rigging
Author: Inspired 3D Advanced Rigging
The Character Animator Toolkit for Motionbuilder :available now:

Thanks for the reply Brad, I havent yet started on it, will be tomorrow. 

The way I normally do it for 2 bones (main bone and end bone) is to drop in a “Chain IK” then a cube or something to use as the effector, align the effector to the end bone, then with the chain IK window open, from scematic view alt + drag the main bone to be used as the “First Joint” then the end bone as the “Second Joint” then the cube as the “Effector” and snap the chain IK on (active)

Hopefully there’s a pic attached with this post of how its set up.

I then create a relation constraint using the end bone as the “Sender” - to Dampening (3D) (Clock based) - to effector “Receiver”

Another pic here too, showing the relation.

Can I use the same technique across 5 bones or will it not work, maybe adding an effector for each bone? not too sure

Thanks again, hope its not too confusing!

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you can add an effector to each bone chain, like you had + -----+-----+-----+ so that each joint set has an IK handle on it or you can use the base one you have setup to then send rotation data down to the children joints, you can add offsets in to that as well etc.. just depends on the control you want over the longer chain. 

if you do it over 5 joints it will just curl, not solve each one, just like in maya or max, ideal solution would be a spline ik solver over the chain but without that, you will need an IK per joint.

hope that helps.
Brad

Brad Clark
Co-Founder: Rigging Dojo-Teaching the art and science of character rigging
Author: Inspired 3D Advanced Rigging
The Character Animator Toolkit for Motionbuilder :available now: