Rig an armored character

[skaa]

Hi everyone!

I am currently modeling a knight.

I will also need to rig the character. He has a lot of armor on his body.

I need help on how should I go about rigging the armor. The character
 will be used in animation that will involve complex fighting motions.

Should I go for basic parenting of the armor plates to the bones?

I need that the armor plates should not be stiff and should have realistic secondary motion.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[chris-giusti]

Someone taught me a neat trick with nCloth constraints, that is; Use concrete preset and point constrain your armor pieces to the body of your character. If you then make your character passive to the ncloth and have the push out variable on the RigidShape node, it looks fairly convincing.. and all the work is done for you practically. Bones would be the next easiest method most likely. edit: if you have fast movements like you say you might, also increase the rigidity and stretch resist (1000 stretch resist and 10 rigidity works, increase rigidity point by point if there's extreme deformation until it works)

[skaa]

Hey Chris, thanks for replying. The technique is quite promising. I'll try that out.

Thanks a lot again!

[joojaa]

Well except offcourse it leaves a gap in the dag that does not update as one would expect! So if you now key the thing so it affect the future the past will not update to match suite. ITs usefull for a small subset of problems. But its not foolproof.