Tail Rigs?

[autumn]

Hi all! I have this character that I'm trying to rig that has a tail like a monkey. I was hoping for some advice on which would be the best way to go about this. I was hoping for a rig which would allow for grabbing things with the tip of the tail as well as natural swaying as my character walks. I was thinking about using a spline IK, but I don't think that would really give me much refined control of the tip of the tail. I was also thinking driven keys on joints, but I don't think that would give me a very natural or easy to work with swaying motion.

Does anyone know of any good tutorial sights for this situation or rigging in general?

Any advice would be greatly welcomed!!

[jessec]

Well, I've been working on (and just FINALLY got it to work correctly.) using a set up that uses a spline IK set up... It actually switches... There are two chains, one, regular Spline IK joint chain... And a second Spline IK chain, that then has the Spline curve converted to a soft body object... This allows the tail to do extra "whipping" on it's own. So it will sway back and forth before coming to it's resting pose.

You can switch between this Spline IK and Spline IK-soft body chains, so you can give it this extra automated "follow through", or switch it back to regular Spline IK, so that it stays exactly with the controls as you tell it to. I found a tutorial in "Inside Maya ", by M. Adams, E. Miller and M. Sims that helped me the most.

But you can also google "Soft Body Spline IK" and find at least two other tutorials that tell a lot of the same thing.

Most of the time, these set-ups will use locators to control the soft body Spline IK curve, but I used a method to make some simple NURBS curves that will rotate the locators, so you don't have to continuously translate them in space.

Anyways, to recap it allows for easy automated swaying as he walks, and also allows you to smoothly transition into finer control, for more finger like control over what he's doing with it. Let me know if you need any help or any more info on it.

[autumn]

Wow, thanks allot!!!
That's really helpful. : )

Uummm.. this is probably a stupid question, but what is "inside maya" that you were speaking of? Is it a book or a video or a website with free tutorials?

[jessec]

Oh yeah! It's a book. Hahaha, sorry. It goes into a lot of different topics pretty deep. But like I said, if you google something like "Maya spline IK soft body" you should be able to find two tutorials, lemme see if I can't dig them up real quick...

[jessec]

Ok, so I could only find this one:

http://www.digitalproducer.com/2003/08\_aug...dy\_tutorial.htm

I found sections of the "Inside Maya 5" book on the web though... But I couldn't find the section on the Spline IK soft body stuff that I used. If you're that interested in it, it might be worth picking the book up. Anyways, that simple little tutorial should guide you through a simple set up and give you an idea of what this set up does exactly. Good luck!

[autumn]

Thanks again!

Yeah, I stumbled across that adress myself earlier. I've actually done something similar to that before, but never quite successfully. Still, it seems like a really good way to go, I'll definatly try it out.

I was wondering, you said you were using some kind of swich between the two. Is that similar to the way one would build swiches to FK-IK arms, by building two sets of bones, constraining them to real (or bind) bones and swiching between the weight of the constraints?

Just a thought....
Do you think it would work to have the spline IK going not all the way to the end of the tail and puting driven keys on the last couple joints to manually to have more precise controll over them?

Anyways, again, thanks for you time!!

[jessec]

Yeah, switching between the regular SplineIK and softbody SplineIK is the same as with FK-IK arms... You have your spline IK driven chain, then your softbody SplineIK chain, and your original chain, which is soft bound to your geometry, and is constrained to both the other chains, and can blend between those two constraints.

And yeah, I've actually been thinking that was possible... Not having the IK chain go all the way to the end of the rig, so you can have some controls for the base as well... A friend gave me a model I did some rigging for... He's a bipedal monster creature, with a sort of dolphin's looking tail that comes off the back of his pelvis. So I wanted to do the softbody/spline IK chain for the tail portion, then use regular control curves for the end of the tail, which was a horizontal fin, so that the tips could flip up and down and such manually.

But man, I've been loving this metho, it makes me want to use it in all the joints, because it's so easy to just do simple animation, and have the computer generate the follow through for you. I've just got it rigged up on an elephant set up, controlling the tail and the trunk. Anyways, fun stuff!

[jessec]

Oh, and just thinking out that last tail rig suggestion, I don't see why it wouldn't work. You'd just end the IK rig at whatever joint you pick, then the rest of the following joints should maintain their original orientation until you keyframe them or set up a control for them.

[autumn]

Awsome, Thanx! I can't wait to try it out.