It’s been a little while since the last release and I wanted to add a brand new toy to the next one that would be fun for animators to work with. Here’s MOPs+ Rig Aim! It’s a lot like MOPs Aim but it works on KineFX joints:
It operates in order from root to tip on any joint chains you apply it to, so you can use it to gradually bend complex hierarchies towards a target. It’s not too difficult to bias a single KineFX joint towards a target orientation, but doing it to multiple joints and having them solve their aim vectors in order so they don’t overshoot is a bit more complicated!
Of course there’s plenty of snags to work out… not every rig is cleanly built, and sometimes you’ll end up with joint orientations that point in opposite directions when mirrored. That leads to all kinds of broken fun interpretations when aiming multiple joint chains:
This will take a bit of work to tune up and built a coherent interface for, but I’m looking forward to finishing it up so I can push the next release! I think it’ll be a really entertaining way to art direct more difficult kinematic chains for things like tentacles, trees, or other weird wiggly things.
Stay tuned!
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