Grendel - thanks for responding!
> DaveH - Was it my robot arm thing you looked at?
Yup! This thread was involved:
http://forums.polyloop.net/3d-work-p...-tuf-chic.html
as was this thread:
http://forums.polyloop.net/3d-work-p...rrara-5-a.html
Though I relied more on the former.
> Are you using the same technique with helper objects
I believe so. I have a helper at the end of each IK section. Check out this thread if you haven't already - there's a shot of the thing with rig:
http://forums.polyloop.net/carrara-e...hat-i-get.html
You can see that I've chained several IK sections together. Each locator represents an IK target similar to what's in your robot arm example.
> Do I get this right that you only want the bending to occur in one direction everytime?
Not really, but if I had to I could accept that. There are a couple of places where I would have liked it to bend one way then cross the center and bend the other way, but I've given up on that. Mostly I just want it to bend consistently.
I remember from Maya that the joints in the chain needed to be slightly bent to tell the IK creation tool which way to do the initial bend. But that was for the kind of IK you'd use on a limb rather than a spine IK for a tendril.
> If so did you use ball joints for the constraints?
I did use ball joints, but they're set at +-90 degrees on each axis.
My current frustration is that the IK solution displayed in the animating window is not the same as what it chooses to render - it chooses to bend the other direction sometimes. I found that one big reason that my renders were not being approved by the director was because he was seeing something different from what I was animating.