Rigging - body deformation test.

[John Keates]

I wanted to work out how to make a body deform when it hit itself. For example if a hand went into a belly.

 

I have attached my test project if anyone is interested.

 

Open the action and move the last bone in the "arm" chain or just play the animation. When it touches the "belly", it deforms so that there is no intersection.

 

How it was done:

 

There is a bone rooted to the belly area that points towards a null which is a child of the hand. "aim to reach" is set to "on".

 

I made a realtionship for the z scale of that bone then moved a pose slider which deforms the belly and pressed the button to stop making a relationship. I then opened up the channel for the relationship and started editing it so that the belly moved in such a way that there is no intersection.

 

This is the best way that I could come up with for doing this and doesn't take too long to set up. It isn't perfect as it relies on a sphericle area of influence. I guess that it would be possible to set up a system of several compression devices to get more detailed movement.

 

If anyone can think of a better way then It would be interesting to hear it.

Body_Collision_tests.prj