TIP: tentacle rigs

UPDATE: This post is one of the most accessed on the blog. I wanted to add a link for people to a Maya tentacle rig tutorial that Joe Harkins did for Computer Arts. There is a PDF and sample files to download.

click for demo movie

I find lots of posts on people wanting to know how to rig up a tentacle and while there are some ways that can work very well, some can get very complicated quickly both for the TD and the Animator.

Depending on the needs of the shot, I am posting a file and a few pictures and videos of some simple but very solid tentacle rigs that I hope help people out.

1. Basic idea- FK Tentacle with geo skinned to it (animated as offsets from IK rig)
   
2. FK joints parented under spline ik animation skeleton FK tip extends out past IK ctrl for grabbing or curl/drag etc.
   
3. IK rig is a spline IK that gives you fast poseing and animation then FK offsets let you overlap and add noise in to the key poses created from the spline ik anim. Helps keep the keyframes for the poses and timeing clean because they stay on the IK.

How you interface the controls is really up to you and the animators. In the Maya example I just used selection handles because it was a quick file for demo, in the Max file it has control objects to animate with and was used by several people. This rig was used where I needed lots of control over timing and poses for the game level, but I wanted to be able to layer in extra movement with out breaking game play, and this rig allowed for that.

DOWNLOAD: Maya and Max Tentacle Examples


Here is an example of the max tentacle rig in action