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Caterpillar rig

Hey all,

I am trying to find a good way to rig a caterpillar. I am hoping that one or more mGear components such as the IK spines would be good for it. But before I start I would like to ask if anyone has some advice or experience with rigging for the kind of motion shown in the gif:
caterpillar2

Any advice is much appreciated.

On a rig like this, I don’t think mGear is going to give you any specific advantage over any basic ikSpline or Ribbon IK techniques. I would use Ribbon IK here because you can more easily control the twist.

I think the main thing will just be coming up with a good control hierarchy, and driving the bend in the body based on distance between the head and butt.

And depending on if you are going for realistic or cartoony, you could drive some slight subtle bulge effects down the body by sliding a lattice or softMod along the straight version of the body, pre skinCluster. I see some gentle pulsing effect in his head I think. But I’d exaggerate that if it was cartoony.

edit: here is a cartoony example I did from a Wait Loss Cinema4D tutorial. The only thing about this rig was that there was an XPresso tag to drive the bump based on the distance. Otherwise it is just a simple splineIK equivalent in C4D.

wermstrom

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Thank you for sharing your insights on this! I will look at some IK spline solutions.

another option is to use RBF manager to setup the automatic movement :wink:

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Actually I am now testing using an IK arm with some FK chains attached for head and tail. Here is a small test anim:
2019-11-28

So far it can do what I want. Still need to tweak the transition from body to tail to not be so hard. Could be just skinning tweaks. Not sure yet.

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Hot Pepper Worm!!! So cool :+1:

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Glad you like it! It’s going to be eaten by a bird :fire::smile:

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poor bird hahahahaha!

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The final animation is online now :smile:

Bird and chilli worm uses mGear rigs. The bird is using a lot of chain springs to get some dynamic motion for free. And the worm is an IK arm. I used a simple FK setup to control the worm after the bird picks it up.

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