so i've been working on this robot for a while but i've run into some road blocks with what i have planned for it. for one, i need to find a way to have black "goo" flow between certain parts>body to head>shoulder to arm>pelvis to legas this "black goo" is going to serve as the rest of the respective appendages. then theres the robot's fingers (and also the thing attached to its pelvis dont ask) which already have this black goo flowing between the arm and the tips. the tips are to retract and rest onto the surface with the goo being stored into it, and also have these fingers be capable of extending. my question here is, what would i need to do to achieve this effect? spline IKs? constraints?
Try using drivers for determening start/end points in animation, a simple tutorial here-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMoBFzXFAUM If you making for game engines.If animating in blender only you can use spline.If again in blender- the goo effect you can do with particle effects that are baked as mesh.In game engine, I would say using shaders, even as a simple water shader could do the trick.
>>649848this currently isnt for a game engine, this is just a proof of concept for an idea thats been squatting in my mindi already have a goo material as seen in pic related, i just need to rig it so they can be extendable and prehensile, as well as have it so different objects using this goo material can be connected between the objects i mentioned.i was debating spline for the fingers at least, my only concern is that the white tips would become deformed along with the goo when posing the spline.
>>649874Well then you need to rig it with drivers and splines in that case, also with fingers you could make them to not deform with splines if you set the verts correcly(or use bones with once again drivers).All in all your best bet for animating objects like that are drivers and constrains.
>>649882are there any guides for drivers and splines?
>>649885I dont think you can use drivers on splines, just that you can use spline along side drivers.And with bendy spline effect you can also use IK like in this videohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS8V4_Ncn0w drivers and splines are for more control way of animating, more detailed, but IK works just as fine.
>>649885those helped but now i have a bit of a problem:the fingers you see have to retract into the arm and im not exactly sure how to make it so the bendy bone doest spread out all over the place
>>649891like is there any way to make them keep their proportional width?
>>649893you can save bones normal pos/rot/scale key and after that save next key as retracted, and then you pretty much can change between them.
>>649894im not gonna lie i havent delved in bone stuff this complicated before and im more of a visual learner. is there a guide for that because i felt up a creek without a paddle reading that
figured it out, just needed to tick volume settings in the constraint
now i just need to figure out how to keep the base of the finger connected to the port on the arm
>>649874>extendable and prehensiletesselate it and animate a tiled heightmap
>>649918i have no idea what that means
>>649914could i just apply a shrink wrap modifier to this?
a little bit of weight painting and a bit more edge loops and it sits fine
>>649929
alright i now have another problem, im trying to rig these fingers to the arm but by following the guide mentioned here,>>649886im unable to have the finger tips move with the rest of the skeleton. what would i have to do to remedy this while still keeping the stretch to?
>>650124paint the fingers to '1' in weight.
>>650125oh no i know how to paint it, my problem is the finger tip bonesi need them to follow the other bones
>>650126these bones, see?
>>650128i don't get it. you want the bones to move in tendum with another part of the rig? or just move in general? do they disconnect?
>>650129btw, did you watch this video before making this robot?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF4CuIX40XEthis video is so essential for mechanical rigs. i feel like you are using drivers wayyyy too early
>>650130all i've used were constraints unless potato=potahto
>>650130but the short answer is no i didnt even know this video existed
>>650130this video did enlighten me on a lot of things, mostly rotation locking but i still have the problem of finger tip bones unable to move witht the rest of the skeleton>>650129yeah the tutorial said to unparent the bone you want as the end control of your "stretch to" bone but now they get left behind when i want to move an entire arm
>>650297basically i need it to roam freely but i also need it to follow the entire skeleton
>>650297>>650299otherwise i get hsit like thison a semi related note, the things with a stretch to constraint need to be made so they dont clip into the solid bits of the robot too... im thinking: soft body physics for the slime, rigid body for the arms and such
>>650300i figured it out
>>650302all i had to do was fill a bone where the bendy is, parent the tip/tail to this new bone, then immediately delete it. it leaves behind that ghost bone or whatever its called
progress on my project which is coming out great but i now have another problem ill detail in the next post
>>650719as you can see, this leg functions on a hinge joint which normally i would just lock rotation so it rotates on the axis parallel to the swing of the joint but for some reason the normals of the bone refuse to change regardless of what i do.
>>650720ok that didnt show the axis right
practically done, but i want to find a way to give its slime parts more mass and musculature as well as solve some clipping issues.
>>650885sorry heres a better rendered version of it
