How to rig a Sentinel from Matrix ?

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for an efficient way to rig a sentinel from Matrix. So that I don't have to animate 15 tentacles in FK. With or without CAT, but I'd like to have them controlled by bones instead of vertex animation

The tentacles would properly follow the head movement.

Any suggestion ?

Thanks

[Ihno]

Hi,
I'd use Spline IK chains. https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/3DSMa...

Use only 3-4 helper objects to control each tentacle.
Link the first ones to the head. And create 2-3 point helpers, according to how much helper objects you've created per tentacle minus 1 because the first ones are already linked to the head.
Then place them the next to the spline IK helpers.
Take all IK helpers of a segment and link them to the point helper next to them.
Repeat this for every point helper and voila, now you've only the head and the newly created 2-3 point helpers to animate all the tentacles.
And you can still effectively animate the tentacles on their own.

You can now use a Path constaint with a little time offset for each of the point helpers and the head.
You can further add position list controllers and noise position constraints to some of the spline IK helpers to give them a random movement on top of that.

I made a test scene.
It would truly need some more work on the noise controllers but that's basically what I have in mind. Hope it helps.