how to rig plate armor joints?

I wanted to ask you people about rigging a specific part of armor, and that is the joints. I’ve been working on my project, and now it has come to the rigging part. I know that solid parts of the armor can be parented directly or can be rigged via weight painting. But My problem it that I don’t want the armor to be rigged with weights. That will mean, the joints of the armor, such as waist, knees and elbows must be controlled by constraints. These joints are not ball-and socket-joints, I’m talking about multiple layers of armor sliding up and down as the body moves. Such as armor of Iron man or medieval knights.
The images, I’ll provide down below. If you guys can answer me this question it will not only quicken my pace of the project it will gain me a opportunity to share the knowledge with the communities who is suffering similar problem to mine.
thanks in advance!!!



reference photo::



do you see that armor on his belly and behind the knee? that’s the part I want to do.

Hi,

armour.blend (457 KB)

Of the top of my head and quickly, there are a couple of armatures in the enclosed file, with a couple of suggestions.

Take a look at let me know what you think, these are only WIP and the leg bones are very short in relation to the other bones, just to get some kind of principle going here. You would parent the armour bits to the various bones “With Empty Groups” and then assign all of the armour mesh object’s vertices to the appropriate bone.

The other option would be to use empties with suitable drivers and parenting to achieve the same result.

Cheers. Clock.

Just noticed mistake - Bone.003 should have the top value in the constraint set to 20 not 15 - sorry!

If you want the plates to stretch, here is an alternative:

armour_1.blend (468 KB)

You can then parent the stretchy armour to the connecting bones on the fans, i.e. those with the Stretch-To constraint. You could even parent the top faces of the armour to one bone in the “fan” then the bottom to another and weight paint the middle bits, so it only stretches in one axis.

Cheers. Clock.

thanks, these are excellent! Though I find the stretching one bit unnecessary- no offense, but still, Thank you for your reply!
I’ll break it down and see the mechanics behind it!

No Offense taken! - just throwing some ideas on to the table for you.

Cheers. Clock.