Animated Robot question

[S. Houtzager]

Hey I have been playing around with creating a robot that has an IK handle. It uses three bones.

Is there a way to rig this guy so that the green hand will stay parallel with the floor. I want the robot to move around while the hand stays flat. I saw Ian's 2bone rig but the hand doesn't stay flat.

Here is a snap.

[Tomas Egger]

Ola,

You could connect the IK Handle to the second bone, not the third one and create another IK Handle to control only the hand, connecting the second bone with third bone.

Hope this help.

Thanks

Tom

[Ian]

That's how I'd do it too :)

Ian

[AVTPro]

Hey I have been playing around with creating a robot that has an IK handle. It uses three bones.

Is there a way to rig this guy so that the green hand will stay parallel with the floor. I want the robot to move around while the hand stays flat. I saw Ian's 2bone rig but the hand doesn't stay flat.

Here is a snap.

There's probably a couple of nice ways to do it as Tomas and Ian suggested.

I was thinking about EI rigging earlier today so I came in the forum and I thought this would be a quick brain teaser.

1. Make a two-bone chain (arm), from buttom up.

2. Make one bone (for hand), left to right.

3. Click end joint of arm and add IK.

4. Make Null Box (controller).

5. Position constraint hand and IK to Null Contoller.

Moving controller passes no orientation on Hand.

[AVTPro]

Here's another one.

I know I'm late but you know me...I like rigging.

Only thing, I can't repeat all the steps but the gest of is this. With robots, you can use the geometry as part of rig. This will help with defeating cyclical hierarchies or parenting that loopback on themselves, which is not allowed.

In the first example, if you attach the IK to the controller and the hand bone with geometry to the controller, then when the IK is pulled past the length of the arm, the hand separates from the arm (because the hand is connected to the controller). This is easy to avoid. All you do is not move the controller past the wrist. You can move the arm up and down with no problem without moving pass the wrist. The IK snaps straight before the controller will surpass the length of wrist and pull the hand with the controller, so it's very easy to control.

It's a pet peeve of mine for wrist not to pull off the arms of a rig. So the hand can be parented to the wrist of the geometry and not the controller. However, the rotations from the parenting must be disabled in the link window.

click me: Puma_Arm.prj.