Guide placement advice

[MattL]

Hello all,
I have a creature that has an extra limb growing out of the back…( middle of the spine) Ideally I’d like to have this limb follow that vertabrae just below the rib cage. However I’m using the biped template as my starting off guide and there’s no obvious place to connect my extra limb rig. I can attach to the root of the spine or the eff but nothing inbetween.

Any advice on how best to approach this?

[Jerome]

Hello @MattL

You are definitely going to need some little bit of scripting and definitely some Shifter Custom Post Step in order to achieve this.

Depending on the situation you can either

• Constraint your resulting system to a spine skinning joint. This is less accurate than the second option.
• Make your resulting system follow your geometry mesh by attaching it to a duplicated mesh which is either wrapped or skinned to the same skin joints as your original mesh. I usually do this by transfering the deformation chain on that duplicated meshes (in which I only keep the closest faces needed for the attachment). But if you are doing any simulation on your mesh you might as well wrap your duplicate so that it always follow… even the simulation result.

This is a quick summary. If you need a more detailed explanations because what I am mentioning above doesn’t ring a bell then let me know

[MattL]

Wow, speedy reply!
Thanks Jerome. I’ll look into the Post step option for wiring in the extra limb off the spine skeleton.
Thanks