How to : rig rubber hose arms

[Gibble]

Thank you for the explanation on scale, DR! That was well explained and very helpful!

[Gibble]

Thanks again for such great tips, DR! You have such great such great suggestions consistently! I'll certainly be adding those ideas to the memory bank

[Greenlaw]

No prob! Glad to help.

[Greenlaw]

This reminds me of a test I created at Dreamworks years ago during the development of a show called Archibald's Next Big Thing. Another animator and I were asked to develop walk-cycles for the character Archibald, and at first, I thought I'd use Victor's old two-bone rubber hose setup for the arms and legs, but the technique didn't work for bitmap art in Moho 12.5...well, not directly anyway. From what I recall, I created a mesh warp that was a long segmented box, and I also had to create a smart bone action to give the arms the correct arc when the bones bent the limbs. This looked great for our test, but my setup was a bit of a hack, and it had limited practical use.

Nowadays, in Moho 14, a rubber hose setup is so much easier to setup and animate with the hybrid Curver-Bones setup. Plus, we have Vitruvian Bones to swap out different arm setups.

[Gibble]

After your explanation, rubber hose arms have been working great! And its pretty straightforward how to set them up. I really like this solutuon!

Two Issues:

One issue I have run into was when using a Referenced rig with that arm style. I cannot seem to get the Switch Layer Order functionality to work when a rig is referenced. But Switch Layer order does work when I use the rig directly aka non-referenced. So that was an easy work-around that can be suitable for now.

The 2nd issue was matching arms don't exactly line up.
When I bring Forearm in front of the Torso: I wanted to switch the layer order to bring the forearm in front of the character's torso.
The 2nd issue was when I made a copy of the original arm. Why would I do this?? Since it is a rubber hose, I was using copy of the original arm but only showing visibility from the elbow downwards so the shoulder could remain behind the character (while the half arm would be in front of the torso). The two arms would never line up perfectly though in the elbow area even though the arm and its bones were identical.

Archibald's Next Big Thing
That show looks really nice! You have lots of nice rubber hose arms in that show!

[Greenlaw]

That show looks really nice! You have lots of nice rubber hose arms in that show!

Yes, the show did look good! But for the series itself, credit should go to the Archibald production and to Titmouse who animated it.

I helped out on early development for Archibald, and I created a few effects shots later in the series, but at that point, I was pretty much committed to Fast & Furious Spy Racers.

[Greenlaw]

Two Issues:

One issue I have run into was when using a Referenced rig with that arm style. I cannot seem to get the Switch Layer Order functionality to work when a rig is referenced. But Switch Layer order does work when I use the rig directly aka non-referenced. So that was an easy work-around that can be suitable for now.

I almost never use Animated Layer Order in a Smart Bone Action. This is because the Smart Bone Action can become easily conflicted when you try to do something outside of the 'programmed' combinations. When I do use Animated Layer Order within a Smart Bone, it's when I'm certain I won't be inserting new layers for shot-specific setups, or won't be requiring a layer order the Smart Bone Action doesn't supply; this is because the pre-keyframed layer order combinations that exist for the Smart Bone will always override any attempted unique animations on the Mainline.

Most of the time, I find it better to make multiple copies or references of the groups involved, place them in the layer positions I want (i.e., in front and behind the torso,) and animate their visibility using a Smart Bone. This works great for general-purpose rigs that will be used for many shots or an entire series.

For one-off animations, I find it's usually not worth making a Smart Bone for this, and I'm more likely to use Animated Layer order and keyframe it manually. A lot of times, simple and direct is quicker and more reliable.

The 2nd issue was matching arms don't exactly line up.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the setup, this should work if the same bones are being used for each copy.

Or do you mean for switching between variations of an arms setup, like switching between rubber-hose arms and single-joint arms? In this case, I prefer to use Vitruvian Bones to switch between the different art and bone setups.

But, yeah, they still won't line up because they're completely different sub-rigs. This is when I use Onion Skin, which can overly the preceding frame using one V-Bones sub-rig, to help me align the pose of a different V-Bones sub-rig.

[Gibble]

Thanks DR!! Very much appreciated! That is very helpful!