If you do a draft render you can see the kind of effect I'm going for fairly quickly. Is C5.1Pro able to let me do that reliably/cleanly, perhaps with more cumbersome tinkering to the rig? Or am I beating my head against a wall?
> Wesgraphics: Just trying to guess what is being discussed here without it ever being said.
This thread veered slightly from the original intent, which was essentially "what resources could a dumb guy (me) buy/Google/whatever that could help explain nuances of IK and Carrara". The project driving me to despair was noted in an early post on this thread:
http://forums.polyloop.net/carrara-e...hat-i-get.html
> Couerl: was the mesh made in Max or Maya or something?
This is a Frankenstein's monster kind of thing. The director bought the model somewhere in an .obj format and intended to use it as reference but execute the real thing using a puppet in a water tank. It was already posed, which was fine for static use. We chose to use the CG model rather than go practical for a number of reasons, but that meant I had to fix the model so it could be animated - undo the pose to something neutral, make all edges soft rather than hard, clean up a lot of the geometry, etc. Some of the oddness you're seeing could be because I (manually) made the tendril sections more detailed (original cross section was 3 or 4 sides) and also subdivided them once.
> Couerl: I noticed that a few of the IK targets were a little away from where I think they should have been.
Yeah, the reference pose on the rig is *close*, but not perfect. I figured that it wouldn't matter because even if the rig was primed in a certain direction it would at least be predictable.
Ha! Wrong again, Dave!
Also, not all tendrils use locators in the same manner. The rig evolved as I was animating it, and rather than go back and redo work with better yet not great rigging I left some tendrils alone.
> Couerl: I'll test the area you were having problems with.
Of course it's OK!
