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tail bones weight

Anonymous 5 years ago • updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 5 years ago • 1

I am rigging a character that has (5) tail bones that I would like to use IK. The rigging is not a problem, But the IK interpolation is linear, resulting in the tail always being straight. I need to have an weighted influence on the tail bones, so that I can achieve curves, is this only achieved via IK pivot?

UMotion Version:
1.22p03
Unity Version:
2019.3

Answer

Answer
Answered
Peter - Soxware Developer 5 years ago

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

From my experience it's usually sufficient to use the following FK method for animating tails which result in very good results:

  • Hold Shift while selecting the first (top most) bone of the tail. This automatically selects all child bones too.
  • Then use the rotation tool to apply a rotation in the direction you want the tail to move. Notice how the rotation is smoothly distributed between all bones of your tail:

The IK feature in UMotion isn't really optimized for smooth tail movement. If you have a good tail IK solver (or know how to write your own) you can use UMotion's Callback System to integrate it into UMotion. UMotion can even bake the results into the exported animation (to save some CPU performance as you don't need to execute the tail IK during runtime). For further information see UMotion manual at chapter "Pose Editor / Options" headline "Extending UMotion".

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

Answer
Answered
Peter - Soxware Developer 5 years ago

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

From my experience it's usually sufficient to use the following FK method for animating tails which result in very good results:

  • Hold Shift while selecting the first (top most) bone of the tail. This automatically selects all child bones too.
  • Then use the rotation tool to apply a rotation in the direction you want the tail to move. Notice how the rotation is smoothly distributed between all bones of your tail:

The IK feature in UMotion isn't really optimized for smooth tail movement. If you have a good tail IK solver (or know how to write your own) you can use UMotion's Callback System to integrate it into UMotion. UMotion can even bake the results into the exported animation (to save some CPU performance as you don't need to execute the tail IK during runtime). For further information see UMotion manual at chapter "Pose Editor / Options" headline "Extending UMotion".

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

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