Hello all. My current project is to model a highly realistic suit of plate armour. I have experience making the real thing, but am finding it difficult to get to move correctly in Blender. The main problem is getting the pivot point not to slide, especially since most pieces have multiple rivets that all impact the rotation and movement. Ideally I would also like recognition of piece collision if possible, but that is quite difficult.
Here is what I have tried and the problems associated with them:
Simple Parent child: With each piece of armor needing to bend around multiple points, it becomes cumbersome to move individual lames (pieces) around to test and pose it. Parenting with complex pieces also results in strange jumping around at times for me due to uncleared rotations, movements, etc.
Standard pivot constraints: To be honest, I’ve never gotten this to work right.
rigid Body Constraints: Only usable in physics. It would be helpful because I could turn on collision but it would be more cumbersome to move about and test specific poses.
Armature with IK: This in many ways is what I have the most experience with. It would work with precise tuning of the bones to the rivet hole positions. However, there is no collision control (ie if pieces impact each other it would not stop automatically) and it basically removes the movement from the actual pieces and replicates the movements on another structure. I don’t like that, and there aren’t any collisions, but it seems the best option to me.
I would prefer to keep this a mechanical movement. Ie the pieces actually interact with each other, the rivet is actually what they pivot on, etc. But I am out of ideas how to do it. Anyone have any suggestions on how they would set something like this up?
Could you combine Armature with IK and rigid Body constraints? Set up your armature and then parent parts of the armour to the armature and let rigid bodys take care of other parts.
For parent/child, try using the child-of constraint instead of actually parenting. One of the great things about it is it allows you to add the motion of a parent/child relationship from the constraint stack instead of actually changing the hierarchy, which is a destructive action and can cause lots of weirdness sometimes. It has other benefits too, like being able to apply it to only certain transforms, or varying the influence (including keyframing it, useful when a character needs to pick up or set down something).
Thanks all. I’ve been experimenting for a while and it looks like a manual checking of collision is about the best I can do. A very specific armature with the bones at the center of the armour at the exact point of the rivet works alright. I have locked rotation, but for some reason limiting it glitches the mesh out. I think I just need to remove the meshes from the armature, limit, and then reapply.
I have no experimented with the floor constraint at all, I’ll have to check it out. I tried a mix of armature and using the actual mesh to determine movement but it didn’t work out with enough precision for me. Thanks for the tip of using the parent constraint. Most of my Blender experience comes from 2.39 days so some of the new functionality I am unaware of.
I am wanting a model that I can unwrap, print, and use as template pieces for actual metal work so it has to be spot on. My goal is to use this as a dummy so to speak where I can try out different styles, 3d print them In plastic, change out the pieces in my normal suit, refine then and then print the template for making it from steel. When I get further along I’ll post something in WIP but I am not happy enough with it at the moment.