How do you rig a bag on a character?

[lkraan]

I am in the process of rigging this character but I am not sure how to rig the bag that is hanging over her shoulders and around her body.

I was thinking about making a closed ring of bones that are alligned with the belt and bag. And then link the belt's bone that is on to of the shoulder/clavicle to the body's clavicle bone so it moves along with it.

Ideally I would like to be able to move the bag around and that the belt slides along while hanging from the shoulder. But that probably requires some sort of cloth simulation.

This model is not meant for animations or a game. I just want to put it in different poses. So some manual tweaking of the bags bones is not that big of a deal.

Does anybody here have experience with this or can share how you would approach this?

http://www.xs4all.nl/~tetsuo/wip/mei-wip-v3.gif

[MoP]

I'm no animator, or really very good at rigging (I guess) but the way I've done this in the past (in 3dsmax) is this:

Dummy/Point helper just above the clavicle, as the "root" for the strap.
Dummy/Point helper for the bag.
Then a Spline-IK setup with 3 or 4 control points (depends how much control you want) down the front and back for the strap, with top nodes parented to the strap dummy, and the bottom nodes parented to the bag dummy. The middle 1 or 2 nodes you can probably just parent to the nodes above them.
Then link the strap dummy to the clavicle.

That way you can control the bag totally independently of the body, while still having affected by the body movement. And the spline-IK usually works quite well for straps and stuff, especially since it's just for poses, not a game.

Someone probably has a better technique than this though, I'd imagine - this is just what I came up with from scratch when faced with the same problem.

MoP

[FatAssasin]

Since it's just for poses, depending on the number of poses and how extreme they are, you might be better off just skinning the strap and bag to the main character skeleton, along with the body, and hand tweaking the strap geometry after you set the pose.

Straps like this are kind of a pain to rig and manipulate, but Mop's suggestion will work if you really want to. But personally I wouldn't even bother with a seperate rig, like I said just adjust the geometry directly to fix any problems after she's posed, and save each pose as its own file so you can go back and tweak each one seperately if you need to. Of course this only works if you're not exporting to a game or doing a short movie, which you're not.

[lkraan]

Thanks guys.
I'm going to give the Spline-IK setup a try since I have never done that and I am not in a hurry /images/graemlins/smile.gif