Ce site est optimisé pour être consulté depuis un navigateur moderne dans lequel JavaScript est activé.

Trouble animating tail

c_h_r_i_s

Hi,

I am trying to animate a tail image and do not seem to be able to get very good results and am not sure why. Below are some images showing the various elements.

Do I need the tail to be straighter before animating? Is my mesh not detailed enough? Am I simply pushing it too hard?

Any help appreciated!

Original image:

Bones:

Mesh:

After animation:

c_h_r_i_s

Abelius

I am by no means a pro, but I would start with bigger bones and end with smaller bones, just as in nature. ;-)

Also, I'd add points inside the tail as well, so you can do something like this:

Take in mind that something like a tail, that is gonna bend a lot, is bound to have some unwanted deformation, so maybe you'll want to retouch those points by hand at key frames.

You may even have to add two additional lines of points inside the tail, just the near the border so they link with their counterparts outside the pic.

c_h_r_i_s

Thanks, I never thought of making points within the tail. Is certainly works a lot better now.

Another thing that has occurred to me - when animating a tail like this - is it better to make the image a straight, horizontal line rather than a curved one? It seems much more logical to apply a mash to a straight line to me.

Abelius

Maybe in another case (i.e.: a leg, because of the knee), but I don't think you'll have noticeable better results if you straight up this image. I'd draw parts as they're supposed to be at rest and/or a idle pose, which I imagine is already the case for a tail.

If you want to have a better behavior for extreme bending, then my advice is that you do two things:

Add two lines at the borders, as I said.
Double the number of joints.

It would be something like this...:

This is what works best for me in most cases, but I tend to rig like a maniac. :p

If this is going to be a mobile game, then I'd stick to less vertices. Anyway, computers are pretty powerful nowadays.

c_h_r_i_s

Ok cool, thanks for the advice 🙂

Sorry to keep harping on about this but another thing that has just occurred to me is which bone I should be rotating to get a nice effect. Previously I was selecting all the bones, and rotating the last bone in the tail - this looked bad and still does even when I add a lot of vertices to the mesh. If I select all of the bones but rotate the first bone in the tail, it looks a lot nicer (albeit with less control).

Is there a general rule of thumb with which bones to select/rotate?

Abelius

Again, I'm no expert, but I'd save bone selections of a third or a fourth of the bones, with control + [number] and then switch between them to rotate them separately, starting from the tail's root.

Experiment with asymmetric selections (more near the root, less near the tip) so it seems more natural. Also, you may benefit from some kind of constraint... but I tend to get lost with those concepts... I'm also pretty new here.

Take a look at this video. Not a tutorial, but you could find something useful in there: Spine SkeletonUtilities driving the Raptor's tail - YouTube

RemDust

would be cool to be able to "bind weighted bones to another" to control them.
In this case, it would be cool to weight all the bones to a main bone, rotate the main bone to apply rotation to all the others by the amount of their respective weights

EDIT : wait... isn't this what transform constraint is all about ??