[TowerFan]

Hey All,

I'd like to animate this wrist/gauntlet in such a way that the wrist heading and pitch will not affect the gauntlet, but when the wrist banks the gauntlet will follow. The forearm and glove/gauntlet are two seperate meshes.

My first thought is to use Follower or maybe an expression, though I've never used expressions before. Or is this really just the same as weighting/animating a solid mesh?

Any thoughts, hints, tips are appreciated in advance!

[Warlock 279]

I'm not sure I'm following your question right, but it should be the same as rigging a solid mesh like you said. Certainly no need for expressions or anything.

Even if I am misinterpretting the question, there's still no need for expressions, they won't help. They'd only aid you if you were looking to automate some of the motions. Example; have the wrist follow thru on a walk cycle without having to manually key frame, or something along those lines.

I'm not even sure what you're saying is even possible from a real world standpoint, if you've got a glove/guantlet on that travels that far up the arm, its going to be affected by any and all motions of the wrist. You're gonna have the hand/fingers effected by the hand inside it, and then the collar of it will be effected by resitance against the forearm.

Actually, as I type this, I think I see where you're headed with this, and what you're trying to do actually. [This assumes tho that by "not affect the gauntlet" you mean not affect the collar/cuff/part that overlaps the forearm, but still effect the hand and fingers, otherwise, I'm lost.] You could actually do this with follower, I guess. Tho it might be easier, and yeild better results doing it by hand.

My thoughts would be, make your wrist bone, and then parent four bones back up the forearm aligned to the shape of the gauntlet, and basically you'd set those four bones on follower to do the opposite of what the wrist bone is doing, i.e. the wrist rotates 10 degrees on heading, you'd want the appropriate guantlet bone to rotat -10 degrees on heading [depending of course on how you rigged it]. You'd want something along those lines for both the heading and the pitch, for bank tho you'd want to leave it alone, that way it still takes the bank motion as it should.

If you got really clever with this, you could actually get some really life-like motion out of it I think. Example being that you set limits on the guantlet bones so that when they rotated to the point of "hitting" the forearm they stop, thus stopping the motion of the cuff and giving the perception of collision.

Anyway, maybe this will get you headed in the right direction, or at least give you enough info to clarify the question. Hopefully this helps, let me know how it works out.

[TowerFan]

Warlock,

You understood my unclear description right. I looked at my own arm (wow, a great reference right next to me!) and I observed that the wrist bank rotation goes all the way from the wrist to the shoulder. I estimated the percentages of bank from my reference.

I set-up two bones in the forarm and two in the upper arm. I set Follower for the lower forarm for 80% of the wrist, the upper forarm to 45% of the wrist, and the lower upper-arm to 15% of the wrist. Works pretty good. Thanks for the tip!!! :beer:

See image for before and after. The before didn't have any follower and the after, obviously, does. Still not the best deformations but the camera will never be this close to the character anyway.

[Warlock 279]

cool...i'm glad you got it working...rigging can be a real pain sometimes [most of the time.