Animating A Snake Or Swimming Whale

[thalamus]

Hi there

The effect I'm trying to achieve is to get a whale model to smoothly swim so of course I have created a long chain of bones down the center of it's body.
I was originally keyframing all the bones by hand so I'm trying to find a more elegant way of doing this.
I'm not actually trying to get the whole whale to move along the path , just to animate it's swimming motion.

So far the only partial success I have had is (with the IK Spline Handle tool) animating a CV curve to move through the chain of bones. Is that basically the only way to do this?

Right now I'm reading more on the use of IK in general that will probably give me some insights but if any of you can lead me in the right direction (maybe you know a good tutorial on this kind of thing) I'd be very grateful.

Thanks in advance for any help offered.

Cheers!

[thalamus]

Ok, I just answered my question to an extent. It's all to do with IK.

If anyone is interested in the problem the solution is simply to apply IK to the bones (in my case it was very simple, just IK applied to the hip area all the way down to the tip of the tail) - and that sorts out the syncronised flexing along the tail. Now I guess I just need to drive the tail with a looping sin wave.... once thats figured out I'll have my complete solution.

BTW - nice place you all have here .. what a fantastic resource.

[vijaytyr]

Hey guy i'm also confusing on this problem, i've an idea for this,let me explain,
after creating ikspline, create cluster for every vertex,create locaters for each cluster , snap them to the nearest cluster&parent the clusters to the locaters.write an expression for 1st locater
locater1.tz=sin(time);
Now we have an to&fro action for locater1.We have to transfer the animation to other locaters with few frames later, How can we make this? this my problem.
In the real snakes the actions of 1st bone are transfered to the sucessive bones with a small delay